Every technical writing job has a set of tasks that sit between you, the actual writing.
Building an outline.
Working out what’s missing from a documentation set.
Putting together an example so a concept lands.
Editing the same document for the fifth time.
None of that is the hard part of the job, though collectively it takes up a startling share of the week.
That’s the part where AI has made the most difference for me, so it’s worth being specific about how.
🗂️ Outlines take seconds instead of an afternoon
Outlining is a strange task.
It’s genuinely important, since a badly structured document can’t be rescued by good writing.
It’s also slow, because you’re making 20 small decisions about order, grouping, hierarchy before you’ve written a word.
Now the first outline arrives in seconds.
What makes it useful rather than generic.
- Give it the audience, the document type, the platform you’re documenting
- Feed it the process map or the requirements if you have them
- Ask for 2 or 3 different structures rather than 1
- Specify roughly how long the finished document should be
Getting several options is the trick.
Seeing 3 possible structures side by side makes the right one obvious quickly, which is faster than building 1 structure then wondering whether it’s correct.
I usually take pieces from each.
The decision stays with me, which is fine, because that’s a 5 minute job rather than a 2 hour one.
🔍 Documentation gaps surface much faster
This is the one that’s changed my process most.
Every documentation set has holes.
A procedure covering the standard path with nothing on exceptions.
Four guides referring to a fifth that was never written.
A system function nobody documented because it was added after the rollout.
Finding those used to mean reading everything, then holding it all in your head long enough to notice what wasn’t there.
Now you can put the whole set in front of a tool, then ask direct questions.
- Which steps in this process map have no corresponding work instruction?
- What does this guide reference that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the set?
- Where does this procedure stop short of a decision point?
- Which of these documents contradict each other?
- What would a new starter still not know after reading all of this?
That last question is a good one to run before any handover.
The answers need checking, obviously.
Still, going from a rough gap list in 10 minutes rather than a full read through in 2 days changes what’s realistic on a project timeline.
💡 Draft examples come quickly
Examples are what make technical documentation usable.
An abstract explanation of a permission model means very little.
A worked example showing what a team leader can see versus what a contractor can see makes it obvious.
The trouble is that examples take real effort to construct.
You need a scenario that’s realistic, simple enough to follow, relevant to the reader.
Getting 5 draft examples in a minute changes that calculation.
Most of them won’t work.
One usually will, or 2 can be combined into something that does.
The same applies to sample data, scenario names, filled in form values, anything where you’d otherwise sit there inventing plausible details.
That’s not a valuable use of an experienced writer’s time, so handing it over is an easy call.
✏️ Editing moves faster
Editing splits into 2 kinds of work.
There’s mechanical editing, which is consistency, formatting, terminology, capitalisation, structure.
Then there’s judgement editing, which is whether this actually explains the thing.
The mechanical half is where the speed shows up.
- Checking terminology is consistent across 40 pages
- Flagging where headings drift from the style guide
- Finding passive voice in a procedure that should be direct
- Spotting steps written out of sequence
- Cutting a section that’s 3 times longer than it needs to be
The judgement half stays with the writer.
A tool can tell you a sentence is long.
It can’t tell you the reader will be doing this while a customer waits on the phone, so it needs to be 4 words shorter still.
⏳ What the time actually goes into
Here’s the part worth emphasising, because it’s easy to treat saved time as just less work.
The time gets reinvested, or at least it should.
Where mine goes now.
- More time with SMEs, which is where accuracy comes from
- Actually testing every step in the system rather than trusting the notes
- Fixing the information architecture so people can find documents under pressure
- Going back to update things that used to sit stale for a year
- Pushing back on interface problems instead of writing 5 pages to work around them
- More thinking about the reader, less production
That’s a better use of an experienced writer than formatting headings.
It also produces documentation people trust, which is the only measure that really counts.
✅ The honest summary
None of these 4 things replace technical writing.
They remove the scaffolding around it.
Outlines, gap analysis, examples, mechanical editing, all of it done faster, none of it done unsupervised.
What’s left is the work that always mattered most.
Knowing what the reader needs, getting the truth out of busy people, then making something complicated feel simple.
There’s more room for that now, which is the actual benefit.
About the author
Aiver Ilaya is an IT consultant based in Melbourne. For 19 years he’s worked on enterprise digital transformation programs. His experience spans ITSM, HRIS, ERP, CRM, POS, KMS and EDRMS platforms, plus workflow automation. He has worked across government, healthcare, science and medical research, finance, education, telecommunications, infrastructure, aviation, construction and property, technology, retail, logistics, pharmacy, insurance and professional services.
His work covers business analysis, process optimisation, technical writing, knowledge management and UI / UX design. He has worked on multi-million dollar programs running years at a time, for national organisations and global firms, reaching millions of end users.
He has run his own consultancy for 12 years and works with a small number of clients at a time. Available for remote and hybrid contracts.
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