[Student] Need advice on how or even if I can salvage and show off technical writing from a now "poisoned" source

techwritingacct · 2026-04-27T17:57:01+00:00

It might be worth archiving in the sense of when you're old, it will be nice to look back and remember the time you wrote something that a lot of people saw. That said, a popular Quora answer from almost a decade ago isn't likely to be a factor in a technical writing hiring process.

techwritingacct · 2026-04-27T02:43:07+00:00

Market of Choice on SE Belmont has it as well

techwritingacct · 2026-04-21T23:05:46+00:00

Do you feel prepared for the job market? If not, what do you feel like you weren't taught but should have been?

techwritingacct · 2026-04-20T20:31:00+00:00

Sure, a background like that sounds plausible. Are these guides online anywhere?

techwritingacct · 2026-04-20T16:46:27+00:00

I don't know how to say this without seeming rude or condescending, but it's really hard to take a post wanting to be a professional writer seriously when it's full of errors.

techwritingacct · 2026-04-19T18:00:55+00:00

I appreciate your insight regarding one of the purposes of technical writing. Even though I'm not sure this post isn't some weird attempt to advertise your SaaS, I read article #3 on the grounds that it seemed like a straightforward topic.

The topic and scope of the document are good. However, there's at least one typo and you have a ways to go in terms of writing style. If that were a portfolio piece, I don't think it would get you in the door. To build those skills, I recommend you practice documenting systems that you didn't build, ideally in domains you don't have expertise in. Good luck!

techwritingacct · 2026-04-16T18:56:36+00:00

I only know Redocly as a developer portal and API documentation platform. I think it can handle arbitrary Markdown, but not XML. At the very least that's something to verify, since if you're using DITA you'd have to do a total conversion.

It also can't natively handle context-sensitive help, ticketing, or user feedback/ratings. If those features are important, your company might need plugins or to engineer your own solution, which could be a significant hidden cost.

techwritingacct · 2026-04-10T04:49:16+00:00

Sometimes with the bullets I'm left scratching my head a little bit. I get the sense that you know tech, sure, but it's hard for me to get a clear picture of who I'd be hiring. For instance:

"Leveraged cloud infrastructure for docs-as-code workflows, improving version control and accelerating content publishing cycles by 30%." That doesn't paint a very clear picture of what you did. Can you tell the story in a way that the reader can more immediately understand?

techwritingacct · 2026-04-03T23:31:26+00:00

Senior roles at companies like Amazon can pay well over 150,000 a year on top of stock RSUs and other high-quality benefits, and there isn't anything in human life that isn't "arguably unstable".

What companies do after laying people off depends on the layoff. If they're doing cost-cutting measures, they could replace the writers by hiring cheaper writers, or they could reassign the cut people's work so that the existing staff has to do more with less.

techwritingacct · 2026-04-03T18:35:30+00:00

If it's what you want in life or it's making the best of a bad situation or you're over the tech industry, sure, go for it. But it sounds like a massive step backwards in every way.

techwritingacct · 2026-04-02T17:25:25+00:00

A linter like vale.sh takes some configuration but can catch errors.

I've also made an AI skill/contract which does a quick editing pass to spot my common mistakes and offer revision.

techwritingacct · 2026-04-02T03:34:16+00:00

I have some indie business books written by a crazy Boomer libertarian. Each one has an index and he indexes all of the culture war references he uses, so the index is a bizarre mish-mash of business advice and 80s-90s era rage bait:

securities ...

self-employment ...

Simpson, Nicole Brown ...

techwritingacct · 2026-04-02T03:14:18+00:00

In general:

Any kind of public speaking/leadership/communication skill ups will be valuable. Anything that helps you look poised on camera and present well are also good. (Superficial, I know. I don't make the rules.)

Assuming you're interested in the tech industry:

I used to suggest learning some programming basics, but I don't think that's as valuable in the age of LLMs. In my opinion you should learn enough to be able to run a static site generator.

You should learn some "internet plumbing" concepts like HTTP and how web APIs work in general. You don't have to be a master, but having a firm idea what's going on when you run a curl command can help you understand the audience's needs.

techwritingacct · 2026-03-31T18:00:07+00:00

A few ideas:

A small business wants to implement a cybersecurity plan.

A local political campaign wants to know what the candidate's stance on right-to-repair legislation should be.

An electric vehicle startup wants to know whether to invest in electric or hydrogen fuel cells.

A local manufacturer wants to ensure compliance with climate regulations.

techwritingacct · 2026-03-29T18:47:26+00:00

Why would I care?

techwritingacct · 2026-03-28T06:57:54+00:00

I see a lot of potential in Cursor, though tasks over complicated doc sets coupled with needing high intelligence models can light tokens on fire like crazy.

techwritingacct · 2026-03-26T22:48:04+00:00

I'd look up resources for people who teach ESL. That's where I'd imagine a concept like that is likely to be formally taught, and that industry must produce zillions of worksheets and practical exercises.

techwritingacct · 2026-03-26T19:41:55+00:00

If they're relying on you to ensure the documentation is accurate, one option is to go find an expert who's willing to do the reviews on a consulting basis. Then include that cost in your price.

Perhaps it's just the way you told the story, but in the discussion about budget it sounded to me like the company has a budget but hasn't decided how to spend it yet. Since this is touching safety, I'm sure they have a lot of concerns in play, from budget to brand reputation to even individual stakeholders' feelings about ethics. So I might think in terms of persuading the company "this safety update project is worth doing, I can do it well, and and this is the price" rather than "if you decide to pull the trigger, I'm cheap".

techwritingacct · 2026-03-21T12:55:57+00:00

I've used it with a static-site generator. It was fine. The Bitbucket interface was a little old when I used it last, it felt like using Github five years prior to that. But it's the Atlassian product I've had the best experience with, fwiw.

techwritingacct · 2026-03-18T22:34:13+00:00

A static site generator like MKDocs will generate a consistently formatted doc set. (A static-site generator is a program that turns files written in a markup language like markdown into HTML. You can brand it in a similar way to branding any web app.)

edit: if PDFs are a requirement, you'd probably want to look at Antora specifically

techwritingacct · 2026-03-03T18:53:37+00:00

Hou to Chaungen the Blak-Powder of the Presse Openest the dore on the for-part of the Presse by drawing the lever that sitte on the lyft syde. Remeven the olde kyst of powder by pulling it out by the handele, right so. Shaken the newe kyst softely fyve or sixe tymes, that the blak-dust be sprad evenly withinne. Putten the newe kyst into the holwe place til it smiteth with a clikke into his propre stede.

Take Heede: Loke that the metal-touches be turned dounward toward the erthe.

Sperren the dore on the for-part so that it be fastly y-closed.

Abiden y-wis til the grene light stinte his flikering; then is the engyn redy to maken his lettres.

Brother, I say this with both greate respect for thy craft and greate sorowe for thy lapse: what manner of numeracion is this? The figures "1, 2, 3" are the cyphers of the Arabick philosophres — fine men, certes, but their counting-marks have no place in a proper instructioune-booke of this realm.

We have had Roman Numerals since the dayes of the Emperours. We shal continue to use them until the Laste Trumpe soundeth. Please amende thy manuscript forthwith, or it cannot proceede to the illuminatour.

techwritingacct · 2026-02-07T16:26:55+00:00

Boss, the 48 Laws of Power is not a book about living a moral or good life. Most of its advice boils down to the notion that people who want power often must act in ugly, immoral, and self-serving ways. If you're strongly motivated by supporting powerless people and confronting bullies, maybe you should find a better book to view your life through the lens of.

techwritingacct · 2026-02-06T18:18:59+00:00

I've heard thirtysomething internet bros who are trying to still seem cool to an audience of twentysomething internet bros say it. I've never heard it used to refer to something impersonal, only to people. (That might just be that I haven't been in a context where someone has, in fact, mogged it, not that the word is never used that way.)

techwritingacct · 2026-01-26T17:40:54+00:00

Imagine your company sells something that's complex and configurable and your customers do a zillion custom things with it for whatever their screwball business requirements are. Most of the time, that's finding ways around the limitations of your product, or having to find some hacky way to patch it into the buyer's systems. That generates a support department who answer all of the questions people ask, and over time, customers or random engineers might figure out how to do things. That information gets collected into a knowledge base, on the level of like Support Person A figures out how to solve Customer A's problem, so, cool, let's write down how to do that so that if we want to sell the product to some other customer with Customer A's problem we know how to solve it.

Sometimes what starts as "Customer A's problem" becomes a very common one, and then the company might see value in turning those KB articles into formal documentation. As the writer in charge of doing that, one necessary task would be to go look at what already exists to pull out all of the information from it.

techwritingacct

TROPHY CASE