Features of a Good Technical Writing

Features of a Good Technical Writing– Technical writing is a type of writing that explains how to do something, complete a task, or use a particular product. This type of writing is very time consuming and tiring. Technical writing is so because there are very strict rules guiding writing technical articles.

There are features of a good technical writing that must be present in your piece if you are especially a learner in the technical writing world. The first thing you must do before writing technical articles is to understand what technical writing is all about.

Technical writing is a type of writing that explains complex tasks in very simple ways for the audience. To effectively write a good technical writing piece, understand the audience range, age, and major gender. Understanding that your audience is male and a majority is between the ages of 19-30 will help you analyze your points properly and also fine-tune your diction to their taste. This will help make your technical writing piece more valuable and engaging.

Technical writing is mostly used in manuals that teach people how to operate gadgets and machines or just how-to articles. Technical writers are usually highly paid for jobs well done. While doing technical writing, always remember that your purpose is to make the topic very simple for your audience. If you keep this in mind while writing, it will help you achieve so much better results.

What are the features of a good technical writing?

Features of a Good Technical Writing

A technical writing article must have certain attributes to qualify as a good technical writing piece. Here are some of the features of a good technical writing:

• Accuracy
• Simplicity
• Directional
• Sequence or Organization must be used
• Correctness
• Conciseness

All these features mentioned above must be present in your technical writing piece to make it very informative and of quality.

Accuracy

Apart from technical writing, any piece of writing must be very accurate when giving figures and amounts. In technical writing however, there is much more emphasis on accuracy. Remember that what you are writing is what your reader trusts and any mistakes may discourage your reader from believing other parts of your writing piece. If this happens, it means that your piece failed to have the accuracy feature of technical writing; hence it is a bad technical writing piece.

You can stop things like this from happening by checking your values from at least three sources before using them. If you say 4,000 instead of 400, a huge error, the reader may end up getting annoyed after finding out what is the correct thing.

Simplicity

Keep in mind that you are explaining to lay men how to operate something complex. Explain everything to the most basic parts of everything. Technical writing is usually done in projects. Different parts of the project are given to different writers. Keeping your own part very explanatory and simple will make the whole project come together as successful.

Cleverly describe methods through which certain procedures can be carried out. Include recommendations but always be sure of what you are saying. Conclusions may help to make the document simpler too.

Laymen who have no prior knowledge of a machine must be able to operate the machine correctly after reading through your technical writing piece.

You may want to imagine yourself as the reader to understand how your audience feels. What will the reader feel like and what will they want to know about? This will help you satisfy your readers with correct information.

Directional

A technical writing piece must be very directional. This may refer to the entire technical writing project but is an essential feature. This is because technical content is usually very large. It sometimes is compiled in a booklet.

Readers must be able to easily find any piece of information using your directions. Including table of content and index will help make this easier for your readers.

This means that someone that is a little familiar with the machine you are describing does not have to read the entire booklet before finding the part they are looking for.

Sequential or Organized

One feature of a good technical writing piece is the organization of facts and information. You may want to have an outline and gradually determine what must come first.

There are certain types of information that should come first before others to give readers pre information or help them understand the document.

The most impressive aspect of a well written technical document is the organization.

Correctness

This is also a very important feature of technical writing. In technical writing you need your readers to trust your information so giving them grammatical blunders and spelling errors would be a huge turn off.

You can use trusted tools to check for grammatical mistakes and spelling errors. Check thoroughly to make sure you leave none out.

There should be no punctuation mistakes in the technical report too.

A technical writing document must deliver correct information in a way that readers trust the piece. This will most likely not happen if there are spelling, grammar and punctuation errors in your document.

Conciseness

Precision is very important in technical content writing. A good technical writer should know the right time to talk about a particular function or process.

Never make your work fluffy. Fluffy content means you are giving information that is useless to the audience first.

When an audience’s search query is something like how to fix a broken window and you start writing many sentences about how windows are made. That makes your content fluffy.

A technical writing piece must be as short as possible. Do not make your piece long. If your document is long the information you are trying to pass might get blurry to the reader.

What you need to Know about Technical Writing

Here are certain important points to note about technical writing:

• Technical writing does not deal with creativity
• The most important features of a good technical writing piece are correctness and accuracy
• Technical writing explains how to do something
• A technical writer must have knowledge of their audience
• A technical report must be as short as the technical writer can make it while providing enough information
• A technical document must be easy to follow, free of errors and precise in information delivery.

Types of Work that use Technical Writing

Here are some documents that are written using technical writing:

Lab Reports

Laboratory reports are also a type of technical writing where you have to present the information to your target audience in a way that they get the required information correctly and simply.

Lab reports are used to show what happened in the laboratory during experiments to other users who may want to carry out the same procedure later.

Operation Manuals

This is the perfect example of technical writing. Operation manuals are used to describe vividly how users can operate machineries or gadgets or products.

The instructions are written in such a way that new users of that product will be able to correctly use it without having any problems at first trial.

Driving Instructions

Documents that explain how to drive from certain locations to another can also be considered a type of technical writing.

One thing to note when writing technical reports is that going around the bush can put your reader in danger and confusion. Provide very accurate information with precision and this will help your technical report look very professional.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers (FAQs)

Here are some questions you may have about the features of a good technical writing and their answers:

Conclusion

The goal of being a technical writer is satisfying your audience with correct information and conciseness.

This article lists the features of a good technical writing and will help you improve your technical writing skills.