Common Skills in Documentation Positions

As I finish my responsibilities as an intern, I do not feel that I am master of manual documentation, but I feel that I have learned a lot, even if I have primarily learned what not to do. After looking at job postings for positions that focus specifically on manual writing, maintenance, and updating, I admit I feel a bit more confident in my ability to adapt in to a cooperate environment because of my experiences. I’d like to spend some time discussing the requirements that seem common to these types of positions, to comment on the corporate world’s relation to academia, and to share some resources that I have found helpful.

While a lot of job listings appear to have prerequisites that are somewhat vague and common on job descriptions, such as having strong communication skills and attention to detail, there are some very specific prerequisites that appear. Two that stand out on several listings is that the applicant should have the ability to handle several projects simultaneously and to create instructional material with only a brief time to actually learn the program being documented. These requirements represent an attitude that exists within the corporate world – bosses do not like to hear ‘no’ for an answer (Soplinsky 112). While I was fortunate that my boss allowed me to spend the entire semester working on a manual, that was primarily because I was figuring out the program before anyone else within the department. In this specific situation, as long as I was assisting the administrative staff in using the program, I could take as much time as I wanted.  But then I was free help. In an employment situation, technical writers creating documentation are required to create that documentation quickly, possibly while simultaneously creating or modifying other documentation.

There is also a specific emphasis in these listings on being able to write for a wide variety of audiences. Often, corporations have grown from simply producing technology to selling information (Johnson-Eilola 579), and while that information may be distributed in a variety of ways, it all must be designed in a way that makes it user-friendly to a wide variety of demographics. In order to do this, technical writers must study writing mechanics and style to find techniques that make writing approachable to the widest audience possible. In some ways this adds to the requirement for strong communication skills. Specifically, future employees will need to listen to the way people communicate and interpret language in order to fit in to a corporate environment (Southard 85), and in the same way they must expressive sensitivity to how others may interpret communication in written instruction.

Other requirements seemed to be subordinate to or derived from these two basic foundations: working quickly and communicating effectively. So, to learn these skills, TPW students must practice and learn.

For multitasking and working quickly, personal practice works best. As I stated, my experience as an intern taught me a lot about what not to do while preparing documentation. Perhaps I do not know the best practices yet, but I have an idea of what works, and especially what doesn’t work, during planning and writing.

For communication skills, I find that there are a variety of resources out there. For style, the Microsoft Manual of Style works nicely, and because of Microsoft’s place in the technological world, the manual will give readers a familiarity with documentation for a variety of software. To help perfect form, Edmond Weiss’s The Elements of International Style provides not only rules for writing for a variety of international audiences but also discusses rules that commonly come up in discussing user-friendly mechanics, such as comma usage and active/passive voice sentence structure.

Finally, I find that Doc-To-Help YouTube series gives a lot of helpful information for beginner technical writers, especially in this video, titled “Approaching the Blank Page”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVlFeN2Bh_Y

Works Cited

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age.”

Soplinsky, Emily. “Survival Skills for Communicators within Organizations.”

Southard, Sherry G. “Interacting Successfully in Corporate Culture.”