As a technical writer, sooner or later you will find yourself in the position to write on topics about which you have little or no knowledge and that are hard to grasp. Your first instinct is to panic and give up on the assignment. However, if you act smart and do things one step at a time, you can deliver valuable documentation. Here are my tips and tricks when you find yourself in a technical “terra incognita”. Hi there! My name is Valentin Zanev and I am based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Currently, I work as a technical writer for VMware, the global leader in virtualization software. Here, I am dev ..read more

Have you wanted to know how to understand your users better before documenting your product? Have you been in a situation where you have the personas you’re writing for, but do not know the details behind the research that was done to arrive at these personas? Then, it’s time to take a step back and do some research. In one of my previous blog posts about information architecture, I wrote about “User Research and Analysis”, and mentioned that user research helps you define personas. In this blog post, let’s take a deeper look at personas to help you understand how this aspect of information ar ..read more

Have you ever wondered why everyone talks about automation of EVERYTHING in technical writing? Is that really important? Well, let me share my story about that. A few months ago I was consulting a product area. They were getting ready with the documentation for their first release. Everything was running smoothly, and the documentation team was documenting feature after features, as needed, as planned. The release date of the software was approaching and the team was getting nervous - have we documented everything? Is language ending done on time? Have we validated all the documentation? And a ..read more

In this blog post, you will find a summary of activities we've performed in the JPDocu School of Technical Writing in the first quarter of the year. We will also talk about our plans for the next quarter and what further learning bonuses you can get. The beginning of 2021 was an amazing start for the JPDocu School of Technical Writing. We were excited to see that after the last quality updates we did to our courses, JPDocu students are getting more excited and engaged in learning technical writing! We've started hitting several milestones that we see as important: 1000 students learning to wri ..read more

As you know, our goal is to deliver the best possible modern technical writing courses. We have just published a new course on writing using DITA XML. This time, I will dive into a subject that I did not cover in full details in my How to Write Using DITA XML bestseller course. There are various ways in which you can reuse content in DITA - reuse via push and reuse via pull of content. Inspired by your interest in the recently released course Common DITA XML Map and Topic Elements, we decided to encourage you to keep on learning! In exchange for your fair and honest feedback, I provide a FREE ..read more

If you are a technical writer and want to create and manage your documents quickly and efficiently, DITA XML is for you. The blog post is dedicated to provide you an overview of DITA XML and how it can play a crucial role in your technical writing. So, stay with me. First, start with a fundamental question. What is DITA XML? Darwin Information Typing Architecture(DITA) is an open standard. That describes the architecture for creating and managing information that separates the content from the formatting, allows for a more streamlined content creation process, and opens up the possibilities of ..read more

If you are a technical writer, trying to understand the definition of the Reference topic type used in DITA XML, then this blog post is for you. What is a Topic? As per the DITA specification when you write and provide information, you structure and organize it using various standardized templates. DITA refers to these templates as Topics. What is Structured Writing or Topic-Based Writing? You apply structured writing as a technical writer. Structured writing literally means that you write in a manner that allows you to organize the information following one and the same pattern in your writin ..read more

Being a member of the JPDocu School of technical writing, I feel so proud and happy to share this news with all of you. Our course Technical Writing: How to Write Software Documentation has crossed 1000 students on Udemy this month! It's been a long journey to develop such a course - aiming to prepare content that is practical and can help a technical writer to understand what is expected in the world of software documentation. Our latest course version has received great reviews from the students. And so excited to share some of them with you. It adds value to the student's life about softwar ..read more

If you want to increase your technical writing engagement, then graphics are what you need! Graphics are helpful to give a fancy touch to the blog post and share lots of information with your readers in a small space. The post is dedicated to graphics you can to visualize your data. So, stay with me. I am going to share some excellent graphics that you can use in your technical writing. #1 Pie Chart The pie chart is the most common graphic used in blog posts and various other fields. If you have some data and want to represent multiple portions, you can go to the pie chart. Image Source - Pix ..read more

If you want to take your technical writing skills to a professional level, then these fundamental principles will help you out. Apply them in your writing and observe some amazing results. I’ll also suggest some courses for technical writing (even free). So, stay with me. #1 Good Grammer From a technical document, the readers are looking for valuable information. But if they find out grammatical mistakes there, then it’s hard for them to believe the information shared in that document. Good grammar is always key to building the authority of your document and makes a positive impact on reader ..read more