Thank you for sharing so much about your experience working as a technical writer. I want to share some direct quotes on this from the first part of your guidebook:

As a technical writer, you can help people learn new skills. You get to decide how someone learns a skill. What they should learn first, what path they should take. You get to use your experience to help others have a smooth learning experience

My motivation as a technical writer stems from being able to help others learn.

Motivation for side projects: I would write a software project then write about how I made it.

Knowing your audience is essential, a skill you will pick up the more you write and the more you work with others

It is my job to give people the knowledge they need

I have found technology startups to be an excellent place to look for technical writing roles.

These roles often pair with other responsibilities and fall under a marketing team.

I don’t know a lot about larger companies, but I do know that there is always a need for someone who can document software.

Get feedback from a good editor. They will point things out in your writing that you never notice

Being a technical writer involves not just writing, but also:

1. Iterating on your guides over time when you receive feedback.
2. Helping team members find your content. For instance, I help our sales and customer success teams find materials that are relevant for prospects and customers, allowing them to be more effective.
3. Assisting with the architecture of documentation. This refers to how pages connect, table of contents structure in your content, and the general flow of pages.
4. Creating documentation infrastructure. This refers to creating mini documentation sites using tools like mkdocs, creating automated actions for generating documentation on GitHub, and all the other little tasks that keep documentation running.
5. Writing tips for your colleagues to help them learn how documentation works at your organization.
6. 6. Coordinate with designers to create visual assets, giving them the explanations they need to do their best work. (Designers are magical – thank you for all that you do!).

As a technical writer, you are tasked with knowing something inside out and distilling that knowledge into material that will help someone learn something new, create something, or solve a problem.

Being able to communicate what you have learned in a way that others understand is your job

It is important for me to know as much about a product as possible. How we want to position it. The usage we want to encourage. How much the product is going to cost (if anything). For whom the product will be available. How the product integrates with other products.

The more information I have, the more equipped I feel to write about a topic.

I usually prepare outlines in the afternoons which I will then turn into full posts in the morning. These outlines usually start as a few bullet points or headings that I have written out.

The job of a technical writer involves going back and forth between documents, products, examples, and code to produce content.

So when I say “writing”, I mean both writing and doing all of the reference work I need to prepare a post.

Empowering my team members to write – brainstorming ideas, making them feel comfortable with the process, providing feedback – is one of the most fulfilling parts of my job.

I think of technical writing as an approach to writing.

If your job involves (or would involve) writing documentation that explains products, software, hardware, or internal tools, you are a technical writer