What does technical writing have in common with cooking? They are both important skills that are often seen as straightforward and easy to do. Despite its importance and use in various industries, technical writing is often misunderstood. Still not convinced? No worries, my fellow aspiring technical writers! This article will debunk four common myths about technical writing.
Since technical writing entails using tech-related terms to create user manuals, guides, tutorials, and other forms of content, it is often assumed that technical documentation has to be boring. In reality, making technical documentation engaging helps users become more invested in the product they are learning to use. A good example of fun technical documentation would be Astro’s tutorial for building a blog. Its use of their mascot, Houston in the quiz sections in each page makes the tutorial more approachable, especially for people who are still fairly new to web development. If you want to learn more ways to make technical documentation less boring, check out Now boring is not the only technical writing myth that needs debunking. Let’s look at another one! 😊
A common misconception among beginner tech writers is that having a blog will help them become professional technical writers. While blogging is helpful, it is not the main way to gain technical writing experience. Most technical writers work with documentation for software. Contributing to open source projects is a great way for aspiring technical writers to gain experience. For example, I learned how to create user guides through creating ones for OpenSauced, a tool where you can look up open source projects to contribute to and post your contributions. Additionally, internships, mentorships, and technical writing courses can also provide valuable experience. If you want to learn more about these opportunities, check out the freeCodeCamp article, “Open Source Projects Every Developer Should Know About”.
When it comes to becoming a technical writer, a common misconception beginners tend to have is that they don’t have to code. While writing documentation is the main responsibility of technical writers, they also test the code snippets for a product’s documentation to make sure they work. Also, languages like Markdown and ReStructured Text are often used to create and maintain the documentation for projects. For example, when I was looking through the HTML section of Codecademy’s Docs project, I noticed that the code snippets in the entry on the input attribute were missing crucial information such as the password input missing a name value and the email input needing an id value. So, I raised this issue to the maintainers and reformatted the code snippets via a Pull Request. All in all, having some coding knowledge as a technical writer makes creating and maintaining documentation easier. Now, before you go, there’s just one more technical writing myth that needs to be debunked.
In general, you don’t need to be an expert in a topic to be a technical writer as good research skills can help substantiate in creating documentation that users can easily understand. However, there are some moments where having firsthand experience or knowledge about the topic. When I was first assigned to create a user guide about OpenSauced’s highlights feature, I found myself struggling to describe how to add a merged Pull Request’s link to the Highlight section. So I posted some contributions to the section for a week. From there, I managed to finish the rest of the tutorial.
Overall, experience with a tool or knowledge of a topic is not a requirement for technical writing, but it can be helpful.
There it is people, 4 myths about technical writing that have been debunked. I hope this has enlightened you about this tech role and motivates you to start your journey. If you need more tips, check out these articles: