Why Hire A Technical Writer?

In this blog we’ll discuss the importance of a technical writer and when to hire one.

There are times when your business needs to convey something technical to your audience and for that you may need to hire a technical writer to create the necessary instructions.

A lot of educated people write reasonably well, but writing technical materials, such as software, technical products, mechanics, for example, requires a specialized set of skills. It takes time to master the theory and learn the best practices of the technical writing profession.

Most scientists, engineers, programmers, and other product developers are experts in their field, but are only comfortable writing for an audience of their peers. But a product’s manual must usually meet the needs of the users of the product, who know far less about the product than its designers.

Why Use a Technical Writer?

A technical writer provides clear writing and effective communication. Their job is to bridge the gap between product and user. Clear description and instructions can make or break your product. It makes sense to invest in a technical writer so your user can understand what your product can do for them and how to use the product.

Documentation is useless if it’s not clearly written.  This is about more than just word choice and grammatical expertise. It’s as important to get into the mind of the user and understand their experience with the product and write it down in simple to follow instructions.

Protip: Remember even with technical manuals the tendency is for the reader to scan first to decide if the documentation is worth reading so you need make the text visually appealing. This starts with layout, font, images, and graphics. Colours, style, and logos can go a long way to making the documentation easier to read.

Some of the many options that a technical writer considers while writing are:

• Online help
• Tutorials
• Charts, graphs, and tables
• Manuals
• Workbooks
• Copyright and legal requirements
• Industry standards

What Can a Technical Writer Do?

Nobody reads manuals anymore, right?

You may think that technical writers is an outdated profession and while a lot of people search Youtube for instructions, technical writers are some of the most sought after and in demand type of writers.  Manuals still have an important place, especially in industrial and technical industries and nothing beats well thought out documentation by the people who actually created the product in the first place.

Here are some ways a technical writer can help.

1. Clearer Communication

A high-quality, well versed documentation and manuals reflect well on your organization.  Users will translate the level of competency revealed through the documentation onto your company and brand.  Contract technical writers help clarify complicated concepts through translating developer jargon into simpler language, helping your organization meet the needs of your target audience.

2. Awareness

As mentioned before, Technical writers consider content from the user’s perspective.  Technical writers are not specialists, but they are aware and know how to connect to your audience. They have the talent of understanding complex procedures from both the viewpoint of industry-experts and the average consumer.  They are capable of understanding the unique needs of your audience, which will allow them to create effective technical communications that will resonate well.

While documenting a product, technical writers test the product to learn how it really works. In doing so, they often discover bugs or usability problems. Fixing those problems before you release the product ensures that your customers will never encounter the problems.

In addition, technical writers often develop a more holistic view of a product than is possible for its developers, who must focus intensely on their own small parts of the product.

Technical writers develop expertise in effective user-interface design, something most product developers never formally study. By proposing a streamlined, more effective interface, the technical writer frees developers to work on the more time-consuming task of making the underlying code work correctly.

3. Impartial

Having the final product manual written by an in-house developer may result in superfluous descriptions or overstated benefits.  While maintaining a high level of detail is important, technical writing is concise, impartial and state the facts clearly.  Hiring a contract writer to do the job eliminates the probability of the manual being altered by personal interest, allowing the end-user to read exactly what they get.

4. Professional Formatting & Presentation

Nothing hurts worse than having sloppy training manuals or tutorial videos. In fact, I would go as far to say that badly created documentation might even be worse than no documentation at all. From the document layout, font, design, a technical writer is able to make your content look professional.  Your documentation is one element of many that complete your company brand.  It is just as much part of your product as its other features and should complement it accordingly.

5. Scalability

Another advantage of hiring a technical writer is that it reduces your customer support cost. Usually customer service is the last resort of people who are frustrated because they either can’t figure out the answer or find it online or in a manual.

By using a good technical writer you can allow your user to use your product better and therefore sell more units without having costly support. Many organizations make the costly mistake of not including instructions or creating clear online tutorials, therefore turning users off their product.

The majority of small businesses or startups don’t bother to hire technical writers, believing that their users are smart enough to figure it out on their own. Unfortunately the people who have created the product have an bias that their product is easy to use and don’t understand the problem from a user prospective.

6. Reduced Documentation Costs

Technical writers can write more concisely without sacrificing quality, resulting in shorter manuals and lower printing costs.

Whether you publish your documentation in print or online, shorter documents reduce the time requirement for reviews, thereby reducing review costs. Because it’s also easier to focus on a shorter document, the quality of the reviews will improve.

The primary job of a technical writer is to write, and professional writers create documentation faster than the product’s developers. Even the rare developer who writes quickly and effectively can easily cost you twice as much per hour as a technical writer—and they won’t be producing anything you can sell while they’re writing. Hiring a technical writer not only reduces writing costs, but also frees your product developers to do the job you hired them for: product development.

You have spent the last 5 months creating a product that perfectly speaks to a market that you have carefully crafted.  You now realize a need for a well-written and understood manual outlining the functionality and instructions of this new product, but you are debating between having it written by your in-house developer or an external contract technical writer.

You may be quick to assume this talent can be easily found within your workplace.  The truth, however, is that writing technical materials, including installation guides, operator manuals and procedure manuals, require a specialized set of skills.  It is a difficult form of writing and often requires someone with varying backgrounds, experience, knowledge and ability.  The challenge lies in the ability of the writer to explain the facts about technology and science in the most simplistic and understandable manner.

The key to a successful high-tech product is a high-quality technical documentation, so don’t risks sacrificing its quality to save a few dollars which will be spend alternately in the future.

Hiring a superior contract technical writer to portray complex information in a manner that is easy to understand for the end-user yields invaluable benefits.  We’ve compiled a list of the main benefits to expect when hiring a contract technical writer.

7. Use Clear Language

Every instructional manual should be easy-to-interpret because clear communication leads to the high productivity level that helps to build effective interaction between a technical writer and an end user. Technical writers have this essential skill to describe difficult concepts in an easy way. They are not poets who use unnecessary adjectives but instead use Hemmingway-like pose.

8. Professional Formatting

Most technical documents are structured in a similar way. They consist of the same elements that help technical writers organize their documents in a clear manner. A technical writer understands how to format a manual properly and will write it in a way that is conducive to professional formatting.  This will illuminate unnecessary changes down the road when it’s published. There is nothing worse than trying to format big chunks of text with no natural breaking point.

What Are The Benefits Of A Technical Writer?

Many companies do not need a full time technical writer so in most cases, it makes sense to hire a writer on a contract basis who can meet the needs of the project.

The primary benefits of using a technical writer include:

Cost: A contract writer can be hired on a project basis. A contract technical writer costs less than an employee who does not specialize in technical writing. Trying to get a non-writer to create a manual or a system will probably only lead to disaster and take twice as long and cost twice as much.

Experience: Contract technical writers have a wealth of experience that they can draw upon because they have worked on so many different projects and within different companies. They have created solutions to problems that you haven’t even encountered yet and a technical writer has the knowledge to get the job done well and efficiently.

Skill:  Specialist technical writers have highly advanced skills such as implementing single sourcing strategies, creating documentation, and task-oriented strategies, creating video tutorials, or updating a template. These specialists can work with your existing writers, if you have them, or on their own. Hire them for an advanced documentation project to improve the content quality or the content creation process.

When Is The Best Time To Hire?

The ideal time to hire a technical writer is while you’re gathering business requirements from your clients for the next release. A technical writer can help you develop end-to-end use cases and user scenarios that can benefit the entire product.

Not only will your product be better as a result of those use cases and scenarios, but your writer will have a complete and profound understanding not just of your product, but of how your users will want to use the product. At that point, the writing can be done well and done quickly. If hiring a writer at that stage seems too early for you, seriously consider hiring one during the development phase when the technical writer can still be party to the decisions made during development.

The choices made during development often clarify how the user should be using the product. If you wait to hire a writer once the product is complete, they’ll be left doing a rush job without understanding the product properly. It’s worth the extra time and money to invest in quality—and quality does take time.

If you’d like to read more about hiring a writer please check out this blog post HERE

The Bottom Line

Have a product idea? Hire a technical writer early. Or do you need to meet a deadline or temporary increase in demand? Fill out your staff with experienced, skilled, and cheaper resources for the life of the project. Hiring a technical writer gets you the right skills in the right place at the right time.

Not every product can or even wants to be an Apple product. Some products necessarily have to have some complications in order to perform their tasks.

If you want your users to be able to use your product without banging their heads against the wall, then your best bet is to hire a contract technical writer. They are a cost-effective solution that can provide you with the clear, quality content that your users need. But mostly they help with your customer’s experience and show that you care about your users.

If you want to hire a technical writer get in touch and we can steer you in the right direction.