Technical Writing Proficiency

Tech writers don’t write. → Not in the way most people think. We don’t sit down with a blank page and “make it up.” We’re not wordsmiths polishing clever sentences. We’re not decorators. We’re architects. And in the age of AI, our role has quietly evolved into something far more powerful—and far more essential. Here’s what the new tech writer actually does: 1.⁠ ⁠We curate. We filter the noise. From dev notes, internal wikis, messy Notion pages, AI-generated drafts—we gather what matters and discard what doesn’t. 2.⁠ ⁠We verify. We don’t just copy and paste. We check, clarify, recheck. Because what’s written in the spec doc isn’t always what’s true in production. 3.⁠ ⁠We restructure. We’re not just editing for grammar. We’re rearchitecting information to match how real users actually read and retain it. Good docs don’t just inform. They guide. 4.⁠ ⁠We translate. We bridge the gap between engineering and end user. Between product complexity and business clarity. Between AI output and human understanding. 5.⁠ ⁠We strategize. We don’t “just write the docs.” We shape documentation ecosystems—mapping user journeys, designing content models, identifying gaps before they become support tickets. If you’re hiring a writer to “clean up” your AI-generated documentation, you’re looking for the wrong skillset. You don’t need a cleaner. You need an operator. One who understands: • How your product works • What your users need • What your GTM team is saying • What your AI tools are missing • And how to bring it all together—seamlessly Because in 2025, tech writers aren’t just writers. We’re content strategists with dev-level instincts. And the companies that understand this? They’re the ones whose products get adopted faster, retained longer, and supported less.

Users don't suck, but the information provided to them can. If your IFU reads like a legal contract, people won’t read it. Why? Because they’re confusing. Too wordy. Too complex. Too scattered. A great IFU should feel like having a clear-headed expert guiding you step by step. The user needs to know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Here's 20 recommendations/writing rules to improve your IFU↴ 1. Write procedures in short, identifiable steps, and in the correct order. 2. Before listing steps, tell the reader how many steps are in the procedure. 3. Limit each step to no more than three logically connected actions. 4. Make instructions for each action clear and definite. 5. Tell the user what to expect from an action. 6. Discuss common use errors and provide information to prevent and correct them. 7. Each step should fit on one page. 8. Avoid referring the user to another place in the manual (no cross-referencing). 9. Use as few words as possible to present an idea or describe an action. 10. Use no more than one clause in a sentence. 11. Write in a natural, conversational way. Avoid overly formal language. 12. Express ideas of similar content in similar form. 13. Users should be able to read instructions aloud easily. Avoid unnecessary parentheses. 14. Use the same term consistently for devices and their parts. 15. Use specific terms instead of vague descriptions. 16. Use active verbs rather than passive voice. 17. Use action verbs instead of nouns formed from verbs. 18. Avoid abbreviations or acronyms unless necessary. Define them when first used and stay consistent. 19. Use lay language instead of technical jargon, especially for medical devices intended for laypersons. 20. Define technical terms the first time they appear and keep definitions simple. Prioritize the user while ensuring MDR/IVDR compliance.

🛠️ The Most Underrated Engineering Skill in 2026? Technical Report Writing. Let me share something experience has taught me. You can troubleshoot complex systems. You can dismantle and reassemble precision components. You can fix what others couldn’t. But if you cannot clearly document what happened, what you found, and what you did your expertise loses value. In engineering, your report speaks long after you leave the site. I Used to Think the Real Work Was Only in the Tools Diagnostics. Installations. Repairs. That’s what I thought defined competence. But over time, I realized something deeper: The technical report is not just paperwork. It is protection. It is communication. It is professionalism. A poorly written report can: → Create confusion → Lead to repeated faults → Cause wrong decisions → Undermine your credibility A well-written report can: → Build trust with clients → Support maintenance planning → Strengthen safety compliance → Position you as a reliable expert What Makes a Strong Technical Report? Here’s the simple structure I follow: 1️⃣ Clear Problem Statement What exactly was observed? Be specific. Avoid vague statements. 2️⃣ Documented Observations Include measurements, error codes, physical conditions, test results. Facts first. Assumptions later. 3️⃣ Root Cause Analysis Not just what failed but why it failed. That’s where real engineering thinking shows. 4️⃣ Actions Taken What was repaired, replaced, adjusted, or installed? Be detailed enough for another technician to follow. 5️⃣ Recommendations How do we prevent recurrence? Are there risks to monitor? Does maintenance need adjustment? This is where you move from “repairer” to “consultant.” 📌 Why This Matters More Than Ever Today, reports influence: → Maintenance decisions → Budget approvals → Safety audits → Accountability Your documentation may be reviewed months even years later. That’s impact. Fixing the machine solves today’s problem. Writing a strong report protects tomorrow. Engineers don’t just repair systems. We document reality. We communicate solutions. 👉🏼 What part of technical reporting do you find most challenging clarity, structure, or root cause analysis? #Engineering #TechnicalWriting #Maintenance #Documentation

The best technical writer I ever hired had no technical writing degree. She had a degree in comparative literature. She'd worked in customer service for a software company. She'd written some documentation for internal processes, not because it was her job, but because she noticed something wasn't clear and fixed it. When I interviewed her, I didn't ask about her portfolio. I asked about a time she'd explained something complicated to someone who didn't want to hear it. I asked her about documents she'd read that had frustrated her. I asked what she thought made writing honest. She got the job. And she became the kind of person who could take a designer's wireframe and an engineer's explanation and write something that made sense to both users and the people building the product. Here's what I've learned about hiring technical writers. Technical writing degrees teach you about structure and standards and conventions. Those are useful. But what makes someone good at this work isn't a degree. It's curiosity. The kind of person who reads an error message and thinks about what you'd do next if you got that error. The kind of person who notices that a process has too many steps and starts wondering if all of them matter. The kind of person who can't leave a bad explanation alone. It's honesty about what they don't understand. Most people fake competence when they hit something technical. Good technical writers say "I need this explained" and actually listen to the answer instead of pretending they got it. It's respect for the reader's time. Not in an academic way. In the way you'd respect someone's time if you were explaining something to them face to face. You wouldn't ramble. You'd give them what they needed and move on. Those aren't things that show up in credentials. They show up in how someone talks about work they've done. They show up in the questions they ask. They show up in whether they seem bored by clarity or excited by it. The technical writing world spends a lot of energy on certifications and degrees and portfolios. And those things have value. But if you're hiring and you're only looking at people with traditional technical writing backgrounds, you're missing the people who figured out how to write clearly without being taught the rules. Sometimes those are the most interesting ones. When I'm hiring now, I ask candidates to look at an existing piece of documentation and tell me what bothers them about it. Not what's wrong, exactly. What feels off. What could be better. How would they fix it? The answers tell me more than a resume ever does. The candidate who can explain why something isn't working and how they'd think about fixing it is the one I want. The degree just tells me they've thought about writing professionally. The answers tell me they care about the work. If you're trying to build a documentation team and you keep coming up short, maybe look at what you're actually looking for.

Firms waste money when they hire technical writers and then use them like formatting support. Yes, formatting matters. Grammar matters. Professional presentation matters. But that is not the strategic value of a technical writer. A good technical writer is looking for the place where the reader is going to misunderstand the instruction, skip the warning, choose the wrong form, miss the deadline, abandon the process, or call three people for an answer that should have been in the document. That is not cleanup work. It is risk reduction. Aviation and aerospace figured this out a long time ago. Those industries became so concerned about misunderstanding, maintenance errors, and translation problems that they developed controlled technical language standards for documentation. One of them—ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English—restricts vocabulary, sentence structure, and ambiguity in technical instructions. Not because pilots, mechanics, or engineers are incapable of understanding complexity. Because people under pressure misread things. They skip steps. They interpret wording differently. They work while tired, distracted, overloaded, or translating information across languages. At some point, the industry realized unclear writing was not just an inconvenience. It was operational risk. That is the part many organizations still miss. A procedure is not successful because it exists. It is successful when someone can use it correctly at the moment it matters. In healthcare, unclear discharge or medication instructions can send someone home with the wrong understanding of what to do next. In accessibility work, I see this constantly. A form can be “available” and still unusable. Instructions can be present and still fail. A PDF can look finished while the tag structure makes it miserable—or impossible—for someone using assistive technology. None of that is just formatting. It is what happens when information was published before anyone asked, “Can a real person complete the task with this?” Technical writers ask that question. They test the logic. They find the missing context. They catch the buried assumption. They notice when the structure does not match the way the work actually happens. If your technical writer spends all day fixing fonts, spacing, and commas, your organization is wasting a strategic role. Because good technical writing is not cleanup after the work. It is part of how the work becomes usable. Caption: Good documentation assumes humans will be human.

The many hats of a single-person technical writing team: When you see the title “Technical Writer” on a résumé, it’s easy to imagine that it's just one job. In reality, a solo technical writer is a small department wearing one badge. On any given day, we are: • Information wranglers: collecting, clarifying, and sanity-checking input from SMEs who all assume their knowledge is obvious to everyone. • Writers, editors, and iterators: drafting, revising, rewriting, and refining until clarity survives contact with reality. • User advocates: user testing platforms and content, spotting friction, and pushing back when internal language makes sense only to insiders. • Diplomats: navigating feedback from up the command chain and incorporating it without sacrificing the end user’s ability to actually understand the content. • Knowledge Managers: designing help center architecture, maintaining structure, preventing content sprawl, and knowing when a page should be merged, split, or retired. • Style guide authors and enforcers: defining voice, tone, terminology, and capitalization rules… then gently enforcing them everywhere. • Voice and tone stewards: ensuring the help center sounds like one product, not twelve departments arguing in a hallway. • UI language owners: writing labels, tooltips, empty states, microcopy, and error messages that users only notice when they’re wrong. And that’s before the “side quests” begin. Because if you own the language, you also tend to inherit Product tours, In-app guidance, Pop-ups, NPS wording, Adoption messaging, and more. In my case, owning in-app guides meant becoming the SME for our Pendo instance, which now also means I own NPS phrasing and chunks of our feature adoption data. All because language touches everything. So when a company hires a single technical writer, they’re not hiring a writer. They’re hiring a system thinker, a translator, a librarian, a UX partner, a data-adjacent analyst, and a quiet guardian of user trust. All in one role.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗶𝗻 𝗖𝘆𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆: 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Almost nobody talks about it, but it’s critical. People want to master tools, exploit chains, cloud attacks, malware analysis… but the truth is simple: Your technical skills are only as valuable as your ability to document them clearly. Here’s why documentation is a superpower in cybersecurity: 🟡 𝐈𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐭 When you write things down, you understand them 10× deeper. Clear notes = clear thinking. 🟡 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 & 𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 Logs, IOCs, timelines, commands, findings… Good documentation helps you track what happened and how. 🟡 𝐈𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 Incident response, red teaming, SOC, cloud security every role depends on structured reports and clean communication. 🟡 𝐈𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐬 Two people may know the same thing, but the one who documents well becomes the one people rely on. 🟡 𝐈𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 You become the person who can present, explain, teach, and justify decisions. That’s how you build credibility fast. If there's one habit that will elevate your cybersecurity journey starting today, it’s this: 📒 Write. Everything. Down. Commands you used. Payloads that worked. Errors you fixed. Lessons you learned. Tools you tried. Configurations you changed. Mistakes you made. Your notes will become your most powerful asset your personal knowledge base, your cheat sheet, your growth history. 🟡 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 A great pentest report doesn’t just list vulnerabilities, it communicates them. You must be able to: • Describe the finding clearly • Explain the risk and real-world impact • Provide solid evidence (screenshots, recordings, requests/responses, PoC) • Include step-by-step reproduction steps • Draft clear, actionable recommendations • Write in a way understood by developers, technical leads, executives, and non-technical stakeholders If your report isn’t clear, nothing gets fixed. And as always, learning never ends. Let’s repost so others can learn.

Most technical writing work is under NDA. You can't share your best samples. But hiring managers still need proof. Here's how to build a portfolio when all your work is confidential: 1. Create Anonymized Case Studies → Write about your work without company details → Focus on challenges solved and metrics → Structure: Challenge → Approach → Results 2. Document Open Source Projects → Find GitHub projects with poor/missing docs → Write guides or troubleshooting sections → Get live samples anyone can verify 3. Build a Fictional Product → Invent a simple product and document it fully → Show you can structure docs from scratch → Host on GitHub Pages or Read the Docs 4. Write About Your Process → Blog about how you work → Share frameworks and challenges you've solved → Show your thinking, not just output 5. Offer Strategic Free Work → Document something small for a nonprofit or open-source project → Time-box it: 5-10 hours max → Get permission to add it to your portfolio Hiring managers care about: → How you think → What you deliver → Your process Not the company name on your resume. Start with Step 1 this week. Save this for your portfolio project. Reshare it if you're building samples right now. 📰 Want weekly technical writing insights? Subscribe to my newsletter (link in comments). Want more career insights for writers: 1. Follow Joshua Gene Fechter 2. Like the post 3. Repost to your network

One of the most slept on ways to break into cybersecurity is technical writing and I need more people to know about this. Companies are hiring for this right now and most people in career transition completely overlook it. But if you can write documentation you have a skill that is needed everywhere in this field. Let me explain what I mean. In the compliance and GRC space there is a constant need for people who can write and maintain security documentation. System Security Plans. Access Control Policies. Audit and Accountability Policies. Configuration Management Plans. Incident Response Plans. Contingency Plans. The list goes on. Every federal system needs these documents to exist and to be updated regularly. And a lot of programs either do not have them or have outdated versions sitting around collecting dust. That is where you come in. If you can learn how to write these documents and actually build them out you become valuable immediately. You do not need years of experience to do this. You need to understand the NIST controls, know what each document is supposed to cover, and be able to put it together in a way that satisfies the requirement. And here is the best part. You can start building this skill right now without being on the job. Pick a control family from NIST 800-53. Read what it is asking for. Write a policy around it. Do it for a fake system or a project you create yourself. Now you have something to show. That portfolio of work can get you in the door at a government contractor, a private company doing DOD work, or anywhere in between. Technical writers with cybersecurity knowledge are not easy to find and companies will pay well for people who actually know what they are doing. Do not sleep on this lane. It is wide open. #Cybersecurity #TechnicalWriting #GovTech

Crafting clarity out of complexity is the essence of technical writing. It’s a profession that requires simplifying intricate ideas into straightforward, actionable content. Whether it’s creating a guide for software users, drafting white papers for marketing campaigns, or producing manuals for medical devices, technical writers are the bridge between experts and everyday users. If you have a knack for translating complexity into simplicity and enjoy helping others understand concepts, this career path could be your calling. What Makes Technical Writing Unique? Technical writers don’t just write—they analyze, research, and tailor content to specific audiences. Their work ensures that users can navigate products, services, or processes without frustration. By transforming complicated technical jargon into digestible language, they empower users with knowledge and confidence. This field offers diverse opportunities across multiple industries, including: • Healthcare and Science: Writing clinical trial documentation, research papers, or instructions for medical devices. • Technology: Producing user guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting manuals for software and gadgets. • Education: Developing training materials, textbooks, and resources for teachers and students. • Engineering: Designing detailed schematics, diagrams, and product manuals for technical equipment. • Business and Marketing: Crafting white papers, proposals, and case studies to communicate value and strategy. Core Responsibilities of a Technical Writer Every project is unique, but technical writers often: 1. Research Deeply: Collaborate with experts to gather accurate, technical information. 2. Plan Strategically: Choose formats and delivery methods best suited for the target audience. 3. Write and Edit Meticulously: Eliminate errors while ensuring clarity, precision, and functionality. 4. Engage with Clients: Adapt content based on client goals and user feedback. 5. Balance Projects Effectively: Manage multiple assignments and meet strict deadlines. While technical writing doesn’t always require a technical degree, many writers bring specialized knowledge in fields like engineering, computer science, or healthcare. A bachelor’s degree, combined with skills in communication, editing, and formatting tools, can open doors in this field. Additional certifications in technical writing can also provide a competitive edge. The Reward of Technical Writing The average salary for technical writers is $60,520 per year, but it can vary depending on expertise, location, and the scope of projects. Freelance opportunities offer flexibility, while full-time positions provide stability. Regardless of the path you choose, technical writing is an opportunity to make a tangible impact by transforming confusion into clarity. #technicalcommunication #simplifycomplexity #careerpathways #technicalexpertise “Turning Complexity Into Knowledge That Empowers” by Jae Duran