Technical writing

Does anyone here already do technical writing as a career? Can someone suggest ways to break into this field? Barring prior experience (which one can't just go out and get), what would make one more valuable to an employer looking to hire a technical writer?

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dynamik

That seems like something that's easy enough to create a portfolio of. Create samples of policies, procedures, and whatever else you think would showcase your skills.

Slowhand

I actually spoke to someone about this recently, and he was telling me that his advice to anyone wanting to get into technical writing is the following three steps:

Learn to write well in general, (classes and practice, lots of each.)
Get into the habit of almost compulsively documenting your work, it cuts down on the amount of research you do up front and it helps you format whatever you write into helpful how-to's.
Read LOTS of books on similar subjects, read white papers, read online tutorials. Do whatever you can to educate yourself on what's out there; and, more importantly, what's NOT out there that should be.

Looking back on the list he gave me, I can say that it makes a whole lot of sense. The only thing I could add to it is that you probably want to lab, lab, LAB the hell out of whatever you're going to write about. So to answer your question about how to break into the field: case studies and examples.

Perhaps you could start with making a technical blog where you create entries that would follow a similar style to what you're hoping to work with. You could make everything from simple setups to multi-entry posts describing larger projects in order to sharpen your tech-writing skills. And, from what I understand, there are plenty of ways to self-publish available today, if you're wanting to get your name out there, but that is definitely not my area of expertise.

Dr_Atomic

Slowhand wrote: »

The only thing I could add to it is that you probably want to lab, lab, LAB the hell out of whatever you're going to write about.

I don't have any problem labbing. The thing is that every company using a technical writer is continually working on different manuals, so I would never know what manual they would want to see examples of.

What I'd like to do is contact a currently working technical writer and ask him what they look for (besides prior experience).