Introduction

If you’re reading this, it means you are a technical writer, and you want to know what it takes to be better and relevant in your vocation. Well, the traits mentioned here are not rigidly standard to anybody; instead, they are traits I have observed in myself and other successful technical writers around me.

If you are curious about the traits of good technical writers, then jump right in! This article can’t wait to be read.

Trait #1: Jumping on Trends

Learning new technology fast is the biggest and most important trait a good technical writer must have. In order to be a relevant writer, you have to write relevant articles and guides. What then defines this relevance? In my opinion, it is the rate at which developers and engineers search about a particular topic.

Naval once said:

If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art — become really good at something.

Jumping on trends early enough to produce relevant content around that trend is a sure way to be relevant in the niche. The duty of a technical writer should be to collect difficult-to-understand technical knowledge material and make it easier and simpler to understand for developers. If you do not have an interest or feel the need to make complex material simple, then you probably wouldn’t be writing technical articles.

You must be capable of jumping to a new field the moment it comes, using what few and complex materials are available at the time to produce more of this for developers looking to jump on that trend. A recent example is the blockchain trend. Technical writers had to delve into the space by studying old materials, making new research, implementing their ideas in code, writing about findings, and reiterating the process to produce useful content. This job is properly aided by video content creators on Youtube and other streaming services.

Trait #2: Do other things

It is expedient for you to have other things outside of technical writing that you are involved in, to truly excel and be relevant at technical writing. For example, a lot of aspiring and junior technical writers ask how we come up with topics to write about. The truth is, we don’t just wake up and think, “Oh, I feel like writing about using the clap library in Rust to build a CLI tool.” It might happen to some, who knows, but it’s not majorly the case. A more plausible scenario is:

You need/imagined a CLI tool to convert articles you read to PDF, so you built one. During or after completion of this project, you decided to write a guide for others to recreate this.

Another scenario is:

You realize there is a need for a particular guide in doing something (i.e., using a framework to build APIs), and individual developers are tasked with the responsibility of figuring it out by themselves. You felt it useless for people to continue reinventing the learning wheel, so you took the responsibility to learn and write about the procedure.

In order for you to be in the position where you figure our what developers want, you have to be among the developers. You have to be one. It is not compulsory, but it is mandatory. You can write articles about a niche you are not an expert in, but it won’t be as relevant as one written by an expert in that niche.

Furthermore, having a daily working experience in a space puts you in the position to discover what relevant areas of that space needs spotlighting in a technical article. It also helps you to better identify your audience. You will find this true on Medium. For example, take a look at the articles on Vitalik Buterin’s Medium handle, you will find this true. The number of reactions on several of his articles proves how relevant he is in the Blockchain Engineering niche.

Trait #3: Up-skill yourself

We have seen the necessity of learning new trends and improving your technical know-how, and chances are that you already practice this. However, most technical writers don’t consider the need to improve their writing skills from the level it was when they started out to their current level. It could be a proper writing course, a book on content writing and grammar, or technical writing style guides like the one on RedHat, Vultr Docs, etc.

Furthermore, most writers don’t learn about other concepts like Documentation engineering, LaTeX syntax, Search Engine Optimization, etc. Chances are that if you are able to learn and master some of these tools on your personal time might be a transformation point for your writing career.

For example, if you are able to write a documentation page for a project you built and published on, say, Docusaurus or GitBooks, you have a higher chance of getting a Documentation Writer role. This is arguably the most lucrative role in technical writing. Endeavor to improve your writing skills, to read and learn from technical books (the most profound products of technical writing), and to work on Documentation pages by yourself or on an open source project, if you wish to become better at technical writing.

Trait #4: A good environment and tooling

Writing a good article is just as important as the environment you write from and the tools you use. You can start writing by simply pulling out a text box and slapping the keyboard as your brain dictates, but that is not always the case.

Sometimes, you might have done your research and discovered similar publications to the topic you are writing on. Do you stop? Do you continue? If you felt the need to continue, you fear plagiarism. So you start using unnecessary terms to complicate your write-up just to have something different.

Other times, you are writing about a tool or technology, but you encounter installation issues, so you consider giving up or following someone else’s article as a guide. It is advisable to avoid consulting other articles with similar topics as best you can, but sometimes you can’t help it.

If any of these screams you, then you just need a good working environment and tooling. Consider using Grammarly while writing your articles. Consider using the most popular operating systems developers of technologies and tools often use, i.e., a macOS device. Consider running a plagiarism check before publishing your articles. Consider using tools like QuillBot AI for paraphrasing instead of making up words that might ambiguate your write-up.

Paid or free, invest in using credible and popular applications and devices to make your writing easier and useful to the developers you serve.

Final words

These are not the only traits that make a technical writer relevant in his niche, but they are among the top ones.

There are other articles in the series; navigate my page to find them if this one was helpful to you. Also, reach out to me on Twitter if you wish to ask personal questions. If you enjoy these series, please leave a word of motivation to continue in the comment section below.

See you in the next publication.