Technical Writing: Your story

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Matt Kendall
Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Jun 14, 2011 9:17 am
Location: Bournemouth, UK
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Technical Writing: Your story

Unread post by Matt Kendall »

Hi to all!

I'm fairly new to the technical writing trade and was interested to hear how others found their way into the world of Help Authoring.

Feel free to brag about your achievements and proudly confess your failures; there will be no biased judgements or envious comments from this author! The idea is to get a sense of what destinations could be available to a fresh face, as he boldly strides along this mysterious career path.

Here's my story...
About three years ago, I started working for a small software company who were developing a product for the retail business environment. After around a year and a half of taking support telephone calls and training new clients, I was asked to take on the task of authoring the manual.
So, I persuaded the managers that Help & Manual was the best product for the job and got to work!
Since then, I've become increasingly more interested on what other options are available to me as a help author; hence, starting this thread.

So what's your story?
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cindynotbrady
Posts: 157
Joined: Wed Mar 01, 2006 3:49 pm
Location: Provo, Utah

Re: Technical Writing: Your story

Unread post by cindynotbrady »

It's strange, but looking back, I see I've been a technical writer most of my life. In high school I was the high school newspaper editor, and I was responsible for learning PageMaker and laying out the paper. No teacher guided me. I learned on the job. And I learned to love computers. I kept an old newspaper article about a contest our school paper had won, and a local newspaper reporter interviewed me. I was quoted as saying, "I'd like to go to college and be a journalist, but I also love computers." I found that old clipping recently, and I wanted to hug my 18-year-old self. I didn't know what a technical writer was at that time, and my track was to become a journalist.

In college I was on the school newspaper again, and I found an internship at a newspaper-software company that also produced a weekly newspaper. In addition to writing stories, I was required to learn their software. I loved both aspects of my job.

The company decided to stop the weekly newspaper, so I jumped ship and found myself a technical writing job at my current company, which is a small banking software company. I've been here for 13 years, and I have absolutely loved technical writing! I find my background in journalism goes hand-in-hand with technical writing. The other writers in my room are from English-major backgrounds, and the biggest difference between me and them is that if I don't know the answer to a question, I find the programmer and I ask them to show me what's going on with the program. The others just wait for someone to tell them whether something is right or wrong.

I constantly find myself thinking, "Is this right? Surely there is more to this..." When I start asking that question, my writing is must better for the end user.

And I love HelpAndManual! I want to wrap my arms around it and give it a hug.
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