Generation Is Cheap Now, Judgement Isn’t
There’s a line I keep coming back to when people ask whether AI is a threat to technical writing. Producing text has become cheap. Deciding whether that text is right, whether it’s needed at all, whether it’s in the right place, has not. Those were always different skills. They just used to arrive bundled together, […]
Getting Time With SMEs Who Genuinely Don’t Have Any
Every knowledge base project runs into the same wall eventually. The person who knows the most has 40 meetings a week, an incident to manage, plus 3 other projects asking for their time. Your request sits in their inbox, unread, for a fortnight. This isn’t a motivation problem on their end. It’s a design problem […]
Anyone Can Learn Confluence, Getting the Content Out of People Is the Real Job
You can teach someone the mechanics of a knowledge base in an afternoon. Spaces, page templates, permissions, a sensible folder structure. Within a few weeks, a capable person can build something that looks organised, professional, ready to fill. That’s the easy 20%. The other 80% is getting the actual content out of engineers, SMEs, business […]
The Requirements Are in the Conversation, Not the Document
Ask most people what a business analyst does and you’ll get an answer about documentation. Writing specs, keeping the traceability matrix current, running things through a change control process. That’s the visible part. The part that actually determines whether a program lands is much less visible, which is sitting with people until you understand their […]
Technical Writers Are Paid to Notice What’s Missing
There’s a moment in most documentation jobs where an engineer explains something clearly, completely, in a way that makes total sense. You take notes, you thank them, you go to write it up. Then halfway through the third step you stop. What happens if the user doesn’t have that permission? Nothing in the notes covers […]
Yes, AI Helped Write This. I’ve Been a Technical Writer for 20 Years.
Let’s get the objection out of the way first. Yes, AI helped produce this article. I’ve been a technical writer on and off for nearly 20 years. Government, healthcare, finance, aviation, telecommunications. I use these tools daily. I use them deliberately, without guilt. The argument against doing so doesn’t hold up well, so it’s worth […]
The Time AI Gives Back to a Technical Writer
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 […]
4 Things AI Genuinely Does Well in Technical Writing
There’s a lot of noise about AI in documentation work. Some of it oversells what the tools do, some of it dismisses them entirely. The reality sits in the middle, which is less interesting to write about, though more useful. After a couple of years using these tools daily across rollouts, 4 things stand out […]
What AI Actually Changed About Technical Writing
The prediction was that AI would make technical writers unnecessary. A few years in, that hasn’t happened. What has happened is that the slow parts of the job got considerably faster. Research, note taking, first drafts, restructuring, and reformatting. All of that used to take hours. Now it takes minutes, which is a real change […]