I began my technical writing career in 2001, organizing and editing the user documentation for the DOE-funded FLASH code, a modular, extensible framework for modeling various astrophysical and cosmological phenomena. While developing software documentation and user guides is an important part of what technical writers do, our actual responsibilities tend to be many and varied. We help design use cases and user scenarios for software and websites, provide web content, write feature articles and press releases on ongoing research and development, develop case studies and whitepapers, take notes during group brainstorming meetings, set up and manage project wikis, and help edit, coordinate, and even write sections of proposals and reports.
And writing, while critical to our work, is not the only skill we must possess. We must also be project managers, web programmers, graphic designers, and document specialists experienced in many different formats, layouts, and markup languages. We become expert users of the software we are asked to document, and we often pick up computer programming and IT skills along the way. And we learn a great deal about the widely-varying specialization areas of our subject matter experts — often in a very short time.
But our overall goals for the work we do are very simple: to clearly communicate highly complex and challenging information and concepts to non-experts and to help free up the valuable time of researchers so that they can better concentrate on doing science and developing new technologies.
