Hiring a technical writer is the first step to improving your org’s documentation. Finding the right person to complement your team’s writing goals is very important. This essay will explain how to find talent that matches your team’s documentation objectives.  Where to Find the Right Candidates? Look for folks who are in your community or align with your mission The best technical writers are the ones that are already familiar with your project or your team’s tool stack. If you host your project on GitHub, look at those contributing to your codebase or documentation. Working with an inte ..read more

Getting Started with Vale Working with Vale is the best automation tool for technical writers. Why? Vale is an open source  style guide linter (more on vale in this article). It tells you exactly what’s wrong with your writing. If you already have a project that you want to use with Vale, this is a great article to follow for getting started. If you are starting from scratch and just want to test it out, please follow this video to go over how to start a project by cloning a boilerplate from GitHub.  Downloading and Installing Visual Studio Code  Vale works great with VSCode ..read more

Gitbook vs Docusaurus. Are you debating on whether or not to use a Static Site Generator (SSG) for hosting your documentation? There are several SSGs with many great features you can use, but how do you decide which one is right for you?  We will discuss two very popular SSGs, Docusaurus and Gitbook, and weigh how their pros and cons. Introduction: How do Gitbook and Docusaurus compare/contrast to each other?  Both Gitbook and Docusaurus are great options for technical documentation. They both offer several different, user-friendly features that can make the documenting process mu ..read more

During Tuesday’s office hours, we’ll discuss how to conduct a flawless user interview as a technical writer. The post Users Interview 101 appeared first on DocumentWrite ..read more

What do junior technical writers bring to the table? – curiosity – fresh eyes – willingness to ask “dumb” questions We discussed how to ace your technical writing interview by giving you step-by-step advice on acing your technical writing job interview #techishiring The post Office Hours: How to Prepare for Technical Writing Interview appeared first on DocumentWrite ..read more

You cannot write good documentation without a clear plan. Does your documentation seem different depending on who writes it? Does it sound too wordy? Do customers still call you to ask how to do things explained in your documentation?  If the answer to these questions is yes, you need a technical writing style guide. A style guide is a blueprint that helps you write better documentation that delights your users. It will make your work much easier by giving you a framework for consistency. However, coming up with one from scratch is hard work. Thankfully, there are lots of high-quality op ..read more

Are you a software developer who is curious about technical writing? I’ll talk about my journey from dev to tech writer. Had to work through MANY internal biases about non-engineering tech roles. But so glad I made the switch! The post The Journey From Software Developer to Technical Writer appeared first on DocumentWrite ..read more

Writing good documentation is hard. One issue that makes it so difficult is knowing what kind of documentation your team should write. A great way to figure this out is by conducting user interviews. Talking to a sample of your userbase and asking them carefully crafted questions that extract useful insights to guide how you write your documentation. User interviews need to be done right, otherwise, they will lead you down the wrong path, making your documentation even worse than before. Before the user interview Set goals Before you conduct a user interview, you need to do a lot of preparati ..read more