Technical Writing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1

Working as a Technical Writer

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering who writes technical documents

Understanding how business and technical documents differ

Creating a portfolio and business cards

Learning about different career trajectories

I didn’t go to film school. My grandpa always says just watch a lot of movies. He didn’t go to film school; he went to theatre school. It’s interesting to learn about the technical side of it, but I think it’s more important to learn about writing and working with actors.

—Gia Coppola, Granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola

Although formal training in technical writing may be helpful, you don’t need it any more than Francis Ford Coppola needed film school to become one of the most successful figures of Hollywood filmmaking. What you need is

• A love of learning
• An attention to detail
• A good command of the English language
• An understanding of how people use and process information
• The ability to manage tasks and work well as part of a team

If you arranged your alphabet soup into acronyms when you were a kid, you constantly asked “why” when people ...