The world will be celebrating International Literacy Day on September 8. Launched by UNESCO in 1966, it is still an important day for the whole international society, as every 5th person on planet Earth is illiterate.
But how does it connect with technical writing? Let's find out 👇
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The main goal of a technical writer is to create user-friendly documentation. In order to do this, you should figure out the level of knowledge of your target audience on the subject in question. When creating documentation for professionals, you need to really go in-depth. If you are writing for novice users, make sure to cover all the key moments and leave out more complicated stuff. But how to be sure that your documentation will be clear for your target audience? Here is where readability and text metrics step in.

In our new free ebook we will tell you about:

📌Why metrics are important in tech writing.
📌How to measure the effectiveness of your documentation.
📌Top 5 text metrics to consider for user documentation.
📌How to review technical documentation.
📌Where to get all the necessary metrics.
📌And much more!

https://bit.ly/2lDBklB

The Cognitive Tradeoff hypothesis states that we traded our short term memory for other features like complex social communication skills (aka languages) and more abstract thinking, kind of thinking ahead rather than reacting to a given situation immediately. According to the hypothesis, our predecessors abandoned the forest and moved to open and more dangerous places which required the mentioned skills for survival.

This theory has some inconsistencies, but nevertheless, there's definitely some truth to it. At least, the part where we are trying to predict the future. Alas, sometimes people don't really like what they see in the crystal ball, and some technical writers are genuinely scared of the direction things have taken now 👇

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If you open a random article on a tech writing career path, you will likely stumble upon the possibility of jumping industries shown as a serious advantage. And, this does sound promising - seems like you will never get bored with your job as you can snap your fingers and change things just like that. In theory, yes. But let's see how you can go about that in real life.

https://bit.ly/2lMkctY

A lot is being said about product life cycles. Marketers are paying special attention to them, many business decisions are done based on the stage the product is at. But if you think about it, technical documentation has a life cycle of its own.

A life cycle of an average user manual can be viewed as a process of iterative nature. It repeats the pattern dev sprints create — introducing minor and major product updates. More details are in our new article 👇

https://bit.ly/2lRNMhJ

Do you like/read comic books? If the answer is ‘no’, you might learn a thing or two from this post. Not just about comic books but why so many people find them captivating and what technical writing can borrow from that concept. If you are into comic books, then you already understand their potential in transmitting information in a very clear and entertaining manner 😉
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Today we are going to look closer at two very popular use cases - FAQs and knowledge bases. Specifically, we will talk about how to make the most of them using ClickHelp. This help authoring tool is flexible enough for creating different types of technical documentation and has many features that can make your content creation flow. Let's jump right into it!

https://bit.ly/2mkYLAm

Today we are going to figure out how a technical writer can prove their worth in front of a potential employer. Specifically, we'll talk about certification in technical writing.

Certificates exist not only for impressing employers, of course. Getting a certificate goes hand in hand with improving knowledge and gaining expertise. They are also a recipe for promotion.

Here are several ideas on how to get certified: https://bit.ly/2nNN2eq

Reality pushes us towards the biggest dilemma of technical writing once again - writing expertise vs. technical expertise.

Many employers decide this based on their subjective thoughts on the matter which is not the best approach. Sometimes, this choice is heavily dependent on company traditions. For example, a company has been always hiring people with technical education connected to its field and overlooked those who had excellent tech writing resumes but lacked tech skills.

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Having the same role for a long time, doing similar routine tasks can make you feel stuck. When you have pretty much figured what you do, the question of what you should do to become better at it arises 📚

https://bit.ly/356MdOT