Techincal writing skills required - writing
Although I say writing is not the most important skill required for a technical writer, that doesn’t mean you can get away with being a bad writer, or even just a poor one.
You must be competent, and by competent I mean:
- A good grasp of the English language (or whatever language you are working in)
- The basics of grammar
- Able to spell
- Able to write clearly.
A poor grasp of language shows in what you write and how you write it. Your work has to be readable.
Likewise poor grammar shows up in bad writing. You don’t have to be a grammar grand master, but you need some basics. I don’t expect you to know what the word appositive means, for example, but I do expect you to know the difference between the following two sentences and when and why you would use each:
- Bill’s friend Alice adored the famous singer Dean Martin
- Bill’s friend, Alice, adored Dean Martin, the famous singer.
Many people can spell. Typographical errors (due to poor typing) often trip more people up than actual spelling errors. Another problem that seems to be creeping in, especially with younger people, is an inability to distinguish between homonyms. There is a lot of difference between, say, a sensor and a censor.
Poor writing, bad grammar and spelling errors not only make the finished product harder to read, they cause the reader to lose faith in what has been written. No matter how good your knowledge is, no matter how good your coverage of the material is, if the work is riddled with spelling or grammatical errors there comes a point where the reader stops trusting the document, where they say, “This person has no idea what they are talking about.”
It’s psychological, but it happens, and once you lose the reader’s trust in the material the user manual, on-line help, web page or whatever you are writing is useless.
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