Before we begin

Let me ask you a few questions.

• Have you recently bought an appliance, a toy, or a phone?
• What all did you receive with the purchase?
• Did you notice a small piece of paper with the package?
• Did you read the instructions written on the paper?

If yes, then congratulations! You have already seen an example of a technical writer’s work.

Now you might think, why does a hairdryer or a toy need an instruction manual. To justify, the instruction manual with appliances majorly talks about the product’s specifications or any statutory warning that the user should be aware of so that there are no surprises later while using the product.

The main motive behind telling you all this was to let you know that technical writers are everywhere; it’s just that you don’t see them every day.

Every industry needs a technical writer. But this website is majorly focused on technical writing in the software industry.

You might ask, what is the need for a technical writer in the software industry?

Let me give you a basic example of documentation for a software product.

We all know Facebook, right? Go to Facebook, click on your profile picture, click Help & Support, and then click Help Centre.

The following page opens: https://www.facebook.com/help.

And this my friends is the documentation for Facebook. Yes! Facebook also has documentation. I don’t know how many of you might have even bothered to look at it before this. But, let me tell you, the Facebook documentation website is an excellent example of documentation for a software product.

You might ask, “Which software product?”

The answer is Facebook. Facebook is a product owned by Meta, and we are the end-users of Facebook. Meta uses end-users data for advertisements. So, the link above is an example of end-user documentation for a software product.

Let us explore the documentation a bit and look into one of the topics.

To keep it simple, let’s look at the topic Creating an account.

If you observe this topic a bit closer, you might observe:

• The topic is about completing a task.
• The sub-topics will help you complete only one task.
• The steps to complete tasks are well-guided so that the readers can complete the task.
• The sentences are in the present tense and in simple-to-understand language.

What you will not see in the topic is:

• Unnecessary explanation of the feature.
• Any marketing content that tells the reader how cool the feature is.
• Huge paragraphs.
• Complex words.