Sigma Technology, as a
well-known company in technical writing areas, has been working on developing
technical communication community in China for the past 3 years. Recently
Nate Zhang, MD of Sigma Technology China, has conducted training on technical
writing for Siemens Learning Campus. Today he shares his experience and success
tips with technical writers.
In
the era of ever changing information technology, technical writing becomes an
art of simplifying complex structures and systems into nice and concise manuals
and documents that are completely understandable and helpful for the end users.
The challenge for technical writers is to develop product information that
creates the best user experience for the client’s solutions. Sigma Technology
has many years of experience within R&D, which helped us to build up a
large knowledge base that we want to share with others.
Nate
Zhang has conducted dozens of technical writing training sessions both for
enterprises and universities. In this article he will share his top 3 tips for
those who want to succeed in technical writing:
1.
Tip #1 Minimize texts in technical
writing
As more new technologies
are put into new products with lots of new functions, technical writers have to
write more complicated content in the user manuals. The more we write, the more
we have to manage. Before creating a user-oriented content consider two
essential questions: “Do we really need all of that? Is there any way to minimize
the contents to make the documents easier to read?”
2.
Tip #2 Stories behind the rules
As technical writers, we
have to learn and remember lots
of writing rules. You might have confusion
about why some common rules were created. If you search for them in specialized
literature or surf the web you will find dozens, even hundreds of technical
writing rules, but do we really need to follow them in actual writing?
For sure we should
create correct and professional documentation, however, our know-how should be
based on a few basic rules, which deal with document structure, grammar and proper
language use. Summarizing the basics in one statement, a technical writer
should use proper grammar, make sentences short and coherent, and arrange the
text in a way that it is visually structured and easy to understand.
At our coming offline seminar in Shanghai, I will share several stories about the backgrounds
of those rules, which will help to understand why technical writing is a part
of the products, only if the contents are following basic writing rules.
3.
Tip #3 Always learn something new
Training is an essential
component of new knowledge acquisition and learning first-hand experience from
the area experts. At Sigma Technology we provide technical writing training sessions, specifically tailored for our participants, so that
they get the best knowledge for their business.
Around 1.5 months ago, I got
the invitation from Siemens Learning Campus to give the training on technical
writing together with one Siemens trainer.
The training had two sessions,
one in Suzhou and another in Shanghai during July and early August, and was
attended by 23 persons in total. We received great emotions and very positive
feedback from the participants. Overall results of the sessions were quite good.
In late August and early
September we plan to conduct several offline sessions for Chinese technical
writers in Beijing (August 30) and Shanghai (September 13). Follow the schedule
of the seminars on our Chinese corporate profile on Weibo.