Can Technical Writing Improve Your Development Career?

Technical writing is the art of providing detail-oriented instruction to help users understand a specific skill or product. It can also be referred to as the writing and drafting of technical communication used in technical and occupational fields such as engineering, software development etc.

Some may want to ask “What’s the importance of technical writing?”, well it has several importance in various ways firstly we’ll start from the developer's perspective. Technical writing serves as a documentation methodology that helps developers write about several things which when preserved becomes useful to previous. To better place this point in a more understandable form, technical writing grants future generations the advantage of hindsight. Let’s take an example of a code bug and solution being documented in technical form, when someone else in the future encounters a similar code bug he/she can refer to the writing for a solution. Regarding this same benefit, Swapna stated yesterday that developers are first-hand problem solvers, so it affords them the task of building the solution or a template for a particular problem.

WHAT DO TECHNICAL WRITERS WRITE ABOUT?

1. Guides and Manuals

2. API / SDK documentation

3. Training Material

4. SOW

5. SOP

6. White papers such as new features being added to a product.

WAYS TO MONETIZE YOUR TECHNICAL WRITING SKILL?

In trying to monetize there are a few things to think about

1. How to create our brand.

2. Who you are?

3. How you are helping with your writeups?

4. How you found a solution for a particular problem?

After giving much attention to the above questions here are the ways to monetize your technical skill

1. Asking for subscription: In writing you can ask people to subscribe to your blog thereby earning money from it.

2. Collaboration: Brands can come to collaborate with you wanting you to write articles about their products.

3. Paid content: You can explore platforms that pay content and technical writers to write on their platforms.

4. Ghostwriting: You can get opportunities where you are writing on behalf of another person.

5. Full-time Opportunities: You can apply for full-time roles in companies that are looking for skilled technical writers.

BENEFITS OF TECHNICAL WRITING

1. Great Communication Skills: Technical writing affords you the advantage of honing your communication skills through the means of documentation. It states the art of information precision and communication being precise.

2. Better Visibility: it grants individual visibility when you’re well-known in the field.

3. Improved lifestyle: With Visibility comes a lot of opportunities from collaborators, company recruiters and freelance clients.

JOBS SUITABLE FOR TECHNICAL WRITERS

1. Educator: Technical writers can fill in the role of Educators in the sense that they teach people technical skills. Regarding developers, they teach people programming languages and other stuff related.

2. Mentor: They guide newbies who are looking to venture into technical areas showing them the career paths to choose and helping them with advice and roadmaps.

3. Public speaker: Because of exposure they become the best fit for public speaking giving detailed information about a particular area in the field.

4. Celebrity: Although a celebrity isn’t a job but technical writing with much consistency in it can make one well-known and celebrated in the tech community.

5. Brand Ambassador: Due to visibility and advanced communication skills an individual can be employed as the ambassador of a particular brand thereby promoting and representing the brand well.

Writing technical contents have methods and patterns advisable for one not to overlook. When writing you need to have a nice title, a good outline, a summary, images and lines of code where necessary. Also, it is expedient to take note of the target audience and know the format to use to make the article more accessible language-wise (i.e. in terms of spelling and grammatical errors).

SUMMARY

This article serves as a surface intro into technical writing, stating the importance of technical writing as being peculiar to developers which is the advantage of hindsight and documentation for future referencing. It also states various ways to monetize the skill example asking for a subscription, collaboration, paid content etc. It also states the wide benefit of technical writing like great communication skills, better visibility and improved lifestyle.