TWJ&W

Development can be incredibly self-focussed. Development managers and developers share information with members of the development team, and can be positively stunned to learn that not everyone outside the team has access.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when development is complete.

• There is a belief that the development deadline is available to technical writers, and in my experience, it is not available more than 50% of the time.
• There is a stronger belief that the availability of a feature to product users is known to everyone once development is complete. That has enormous impact on technical writers because:
  • Technical writers sometimes must wait for confirmation that the product’s functionality is available before taking the step that makes documentation visible to customers.
  • Technical writers sometimes do not have access to the product that users do, and cannot check whether the functionality has been made available.

I sympathize with you if you want to believe, “Well, those are just companies that communicate poorly.” That may be so. But they are still the vast majority of companies, and I lose sympathy with you if you want to argue that they are a minority.

I’m a technical writer with a career of 20 years’ experience in full-time documentation of software (and occasionally hardware).

When I was doing my undergraduate degree in English, I took a creative writing course. Each week, we had the assignment of writing in a different style, and it was always most enjoyable. The week that we had to demonstrate our skill in instructional writing, I took advantage of my natural aptitude for detail and wrote a procedure for making a photographic print using a film negative and an enlarger. I got great marks for that assignment. (Historical note: We were still a long way from using digital cameras, so film negatives were still very much a thing.) I wrote with precision and clarity.