Technical Writing Blog

Developing good habits and getting rid of the bad ones is something that applies not only to our personal lives but our careers as well. Today we’d like to talk about good habits that technical writers can work on to improve performance and prevent burnouts. Behold! These habits will change things for the better. Creating…

If you are concerned about your user manuals looking bad, this article will give you certain focus points improving which can turn the situation around. How far you want to take it depends on your subjective opinion regarding this matter. Some people believe that when technical documents look neat, and there are no design elements…

Parallel structure, also called parallelism or parallel construction, is something you are likely to remember from school. Parallel structure in writing means that sentences or elements within sentences have a similar grammar pattern. Such repetition serves several purposes. In literature, it is often a means to draw a reader’s attention to a particular situation, certain…

Does authoring help topics make you an author? We believe it does. And although maybe everything you are creating along the lines of technical documentation becomes the property of the company you are working for, it is more about how you are perceiving yourself. The market is demanding, even on this blog, we are often…

You will certainly meet people in this world who say things like ‘I don’t care how this user manual looks as long as it is well-written and contains answers to my questions.’ It is great to know that some people are this practical and able to look past the visual side of things. However, people…

When a customer opens a user manual, the idea that the text is lying or it is trying to manipulate them will hardly ever cross their mind. Who would want to lie in technical documentation and why? The grim statement proclaiming that everybody lies proves to be true yet again. Here’s what technical writers lie…

While technical documentation is mostly associated with text, it is much more than this. Without visual content technical texts are boring and hard to comprehend. Using diagrams in help topics is a great way to improve your content. However, you need to remember that with diagrams less is often more; they are extremely helpful, but…

People like to think that they got rid of Waterfall for good, while in reality, many companies are still performing somewhere in between Waterfall and Agile. Nevertheless, even if you feel like you can’t call what your company is doing pure Agile, you need to be prepared to face what this new model is going…

In continuous integration, software developers submit code to a shared repository several times a day. The main idea behind it is catching issues at the earliest stages and fixing them. And, in theory, you can have new releases daily. This approach was introduced in the 90s. In late 90s, CI was described in several books…

ClickHelp has grown a lot for the past few years in terms of clients and feature-wise. If you think about it, these two facts are connected. Listening to our clients and fine-tuning our development road map based on the feedback is how we prefer to move forward. Although ClickHelp is a pretty straightforward help authoring…