I’m writing to the bloggers, the business writers, and for you guys, “Write what you know” is your bread and butter. “Write what you know” is the answer to questions you haven’t even considered yet.
Technical writing is all about translating understanding — it’s about converting expert information into a more easily accessible format. Whenever you’re writing, your job is to take the things you understand, that your readers don’t, and help your readers understand them.
That’s the biggest challenge of any blogging project: keeping up with the blog’s posting schedule. Really, it’s just a regularly recurring version of what is the biggest challenge for every writer: writing to a deadline.
There are techniques for handling that last minute writing, skills you can learn to make it as good as possible, but in the end that’s all just damage control. You cannot write your best quality work unless you write it early.
One of the rules of good technical writing goes, “Always include a paragraph of normal body text after every heading.” We’re going to get that practice this week with a good old-fashioned To-Do List. Make a list of all the projects you’re working on right now, all the stuff you need to get done, but spend some time formatting it and packing in information to make it useful to a reader other than you.
Write up a short autobiography of you as a writer (300-900 words). Make it three sections, with appropriate headings, and generally answer the questions above. Tell us where you’re coming from, so we can better help you get where you need to be.
Our first writing exercises focus on the Christmas holidays! Head over to the new forums to write a fake complaint letter to Santa Claus, or practice with point of view by writing a blog post about Christmas from someone else’s perspective.
Tweet Between my About page, my introductory article, and just the name of the website, I’ve already made a lot of big promises. Turning Technical Writing into a simple, stress-free task is no small feat, but we’re going to get started right now. While reading that introductory material, you may have noticed that I referred […]
Tweet I have just made the startling discovery that I can turn you into a better writer. As you may have seen in my About page, I’ve recently become a Technical Writing professor. There’s an old saying some of you are probably already thinking about that goes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” […]
