The profession of technical writing is no more an isolated domain of west. The past decades have ushered the emerging numbers of technical writers in India too. To those who have not come across this profession or this opportunity, technical writing is the art and science of writing about the technical subjects to help end users of the technology.
Most often the requirement of becoming a technical writers demands advanced knowledge of English writing. In fact the good knowledge of English writing holds good to comprehend complex technical knowledge into simple English writing that helps user to understand the technology. But don’t get misguided that to be a technical writer you need to have prior experience of journalism or mass communication or a post graduate degree in English. If you have flare for writing in English and if you can write simple and crisp English, you are in the league. However, if you are transitioning from Journalism or have a post graduate degree in English, you will have an edge. Yet again, I would say that writing is more of an art than science and it can be anyone’s passion.
Today, the opportunity in the market requires you to be good in English. Many companies would prefer you to be on-board and train you in the technical writing on job. Most others would like to have a person who has some exposure of technical writing and knowledge of styles and tools of the trade.
The technical writing training offered by different institutes in different parts of the country exposes you on the knowledge of the following:
- Different style guides of technical writing
- User guide authoring and publishing tools
- Help authoring and editing tools
- Image editing and designing tools
- Classroom sessions on procedure and instruction writing
- A glimpse of different kinds of documents written by a technical writer
- The different technological domain in which technical writers are getting employed
- Creating a sample documents
The training institutes are meant to teach technical writing and not English writing. You will be disappointed if you think that they can teach you technical writing without you knowing English writing. However, you can complement your average level of writing skills with the expert level of authoring tool knowledge which often required in trouble shooting and that makes you a production specialist.
If you have good skills of writing and preliminary knowledge of authoring tool, getting a job as a technical writer will not be tough. Today, almost all the industry driven by technology requires technical writers into their fold. Being a trained technical writer would greatly enhance your chances of getting a job.
