How to Become a Technical Writer – A Guide for Developers

Being a top-notch developer was my dream – until I realized I could combine my passion for writing with my technical knowledge to earn a living. That's right: I'm talking about becoming a technical writer.

And if you're a developer, you may be in a good position to get into technical writing if it's something that interests you.

Developers have a lot of knowledge about topics like Git, Markdown, programming languages, and IDEs that they can use to teach others. And since they have worked with these tools and technologies themselves, they can often write documentation with a user-centric approach.

It's also fairly lucrative to be a technical writer, with the average salary in the US being $76,432 per year. This makes it a viable career to support yourself and your family.

Luckily, I had technical writing samples to exhibit my writing skills when I decided to give it a chance. My love for writing offered me a ready-made technical writing portfolio and made my career change easier.

But this is not the case for everyone and people regularly ask me tips to start technical writing and earn through it. So I'm compiling all the things that helped me transition into technical writing in this article.

What is Technical Writing?

Technical writing typically involves breaking down complex technical knowledge into simple words, making it easier for a non-technical audience to grasp technical concepts. The aim of technical writing is to ensure that users can effectively use a technology, which ultimately improves user satisfaction.

As a technical writer, you can write about a wide range of topics and write for different purposes and audiences. Some of the types of writing you may do will include:

• User manuals
• Documentation
• Detailed guides
• Blog posts
• White papers
• SOPs

and so on.

Accuracy, consistency, clarity, and conciseness are some of the crucial aspects of technical writing.

What are the Responsibilities of a Technical Writer?

Technical writing requires extensive research, which can make the writing process longer. Technical writers stay in a loop with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to understand the technical details of client products/ services.

After gathering loads of information through expert interviews and research, technical writers compile relevant information into their writing.

After gaining some experience, technical writers might also have to edit and proofread others' writing. Proofreading and editing require patience, attention to detail, and empathy.

How to Become a Technical Writer

Share Your Knowledge

Start writing tutorials, how-to guides, and share your experience with technology on an open publishing platform like Medium, Hashnode, or HackerNoon. These blog sites are easy to handle for beginners because they're free and some of their publications have a huge audience base.

If you're unsure about how to write technical articles, start reading a lot of them. This will start to give you the sense of how technical writers share their information in an approachable way, how they structure their articles, what topics they focus on, and so on.

Below are some beginner-friendly blog post ideas:

• How to do X in/ using Y (Example: How to build a portfolio website in WordPress)
• X ways to do Y (Example: 3 ways to avoid overfitting in machine learning models)
• What I learned in 10 days of working with X (Example: What I learned in 10 days of working in VSCode)
• A guide to X: Everything you need to know (Example: A guide to AI Website builders: Everything you need to know)

You can also read various publications' technical writing guides. These contain a lot of helpful hints and information about how to write good technical tutorials. Digital Ocean has a pretty well-known one, and freeCodeCamp has their own as well.

Build a Portfolio

Once you've got a few writing samples, you can help build your credibility by creating an online portfolio that contains all your writing samples. This is something you can share with potential employers or project maintainers.

You can share it on social media platforms, display it on LinkedIn featured section, and send to potential clients.

You can also try writing for publications. Well-known publications often have a huge following and they share contributor content on their social media platforms. This can help build your personal brand as a technical writer, grow your network, and motivate you to write more good stuff.

Some publications that accept contributions from new writers are:

• freeCodeCamp: freeCodeCamp expects you to have at least three writing samples when you submit a contributor application. The application process is a bit more rigorous than some, and they don't accept every application for various reasons. But if you don't hear from them and aren't accepted the first time, don't give up. You can keep improving your writing, and try again later – or try other publications. You can find the fCC contributor guidelines here.
• Towards Data Science: Towards Data Science accepts articles revolving around data science and machine learning. They expect you to submit well-structured, comprehensive, and up-to-date articles. Read the TDS contributor guidelines here.
• Level Up Coding: Level Up Coding is an online publication focused on sharing technical knowledge to help software engineers learn and grow. They have an audience of developers, designers, and data scientists so they expect content that's useful to them. Here are the contributing guidelines for Level Up Coding.

Though all publications have contributing guidelines in place to help contributors write relevant samples, a few tips to make your pitch a success are:

1. Get familiar: Read at least 3-5 top-performing articles in the publication you want to contribute to. Pay attention to the tone of voice and the level of detail shared to understand their preferences.
2. Create an outline: An outline is a structure for your content that keeps you on track while writing. You can create a good outline using top-performing content, AI tools, and your expertise.
3. Drafting: Create a draft based on your outline and let it sit for at least two days. This gap helps you spot mistakes in your draft that you might overlook during or immediately after writing.
4. Submit your draft: Finally, send your draft for review to the publication. They might edit your draft or ask you to make some changes before they publish it. Some publications also use AI content detectors, so if your publication does, make sure to verify your content using the same AI detector.

Share Your Work

While you're building your portfolio of technical articles, you can share them on LinkedIn (and other social media sites like Twitter) to let the world know about your new skills – and that you're writing about interesting technical topics.

You can also include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the articles you write, if the publication allows it, to help people find you. You'll be amazed to see how many people admire your work, and this will keep you going. You might also receive paid projects and job opportunities in your DMs.

Upskill to Documentation Writing

One great way to practice your technical writing (and help others along the way) is to contribute to documentation issues on GitHub open-source projects. This will expand your skillset and give you experience writing documentation and help you become more familiar with contributor guidelines.

Documentation writing is more focused on the product and, unlike blog posts, is usually concise. It follows a predefined structure, and the content format across pages is consistent. Accessibility, consistency, and clarity are the general best practices of writing documentation.

Pay attention to the editor's suggestions to develop a better understanding. There are usually two types of editor suggestions: objective and subjective. Objective suggestions are about general writing guidelines such as transition and clarity, whereas subjective suggestions are focused on company tone and preference.

Objective suggestions help you improve your writing skills and subjective suggestions guide you to align with company voice.

Find Paid Projects

Once you're comfortable writing technical content and doing content research, start searching for paid work. Apply to entry level jobs or look for freelance projects on job boards and in your circle. Doing the real work will really help advance your technical writing journey.

Though freelance platforms have become competitive, you can still find paid projects there. Personal branding works wonders in landing paid opportunities. Keep your GitHub and LinkedIn profiles updated, and share your achievements there to attract potential clients and stand out from the crowd.

How to Learn the Skills for Technical Writing

You can find a lot of quality writing courses, but finding the right course can be a struggle. I've taken quite a few writing courses and I'd love to help you out by sharing the tips and courses that are worth your time:

1. The Secret Sauce of Great Writing by Shani Raja is a perfect course for beginners. It covers the core aspects of good writing with practice exercises and lots of examples.
2. DevRel Uni is an online cohort-based program for people seeking to switch to developer relations. They've got a separate class on documentation writing where experts share the secrets of good documentation.
3. Whenever you secure your first external project, pay attention to editor suggestions. If it's a contributor article and they don't offer a one-to-one editing process, compare your submitted copy with the published article. Take notes of the changes they made. Editor suggestions are precious to make your writing better and if you take them seriously, you'll witness improvements in your writing soon.

Conclusion

Though career change can be exciting, transitioning from development to technical writing isn't too daunting. You just need to manage your career change anxiety, build a portfolio, and start cultivating your personal brand for a successful transition.

Still got questions? Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.