Requirements of Technical writers

REQUIRED QUALIFICATION: An aspirant must have good command over language and must have basic computer skills and awareness about technology.
Technical Writer must have deep domain knowledge.
There are two types of aspirants who want to become technical writers.
1. Those coming from fields such as journalism, creative writing, and masters in English
2. Those coming from technical back ground
Those, who enjoy good command over language, may lack soft skills and minimum awareness about technical things. They try to write in a flowery language rather than an easily comprehensive language and most often, they lack basic awareness about technical things.
Those, who enjoy sound technical knowledge, may lack good command over language, grammar and style of writing. Hence, aspirants must have both command over language as well as technical soundness. Domain knowledge is another mandatory requirement for the aspirants.
REQUIRED SOFTWARE SKILLS: An aspirant who aspires to become a technical writer must have extensive skills in Frame maker, ROBO Help, Acrobat and Word. It is preferable to have experience in creating web pages using HTML, XML and Dream weaver.
REQUIRED ATTITUDE: A technical writer must possess following personal qualities.
• He must enjoy a good command over English
• He must be a good communicator
• He must always keep himself updated with state-of-art technology
• If a technical writer has to prepare a document on unknown topic, he has to educate himself by reading various books on the topic. He has to meet several Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
• He must be a good listener because he is required to meet several Subject Matter Experts
• He must be good at information gathering and information organization.

Written by: S. Chandrashekara Reddy
chandrashekarareddys@gmail.com