When it comes to legal text, the technical writer’s first rule is simple:
There are legal reasons why disclaimers, copyright notices, privacy policies, and other examples of fine print were phrased the way they were. Under no circumstances do you “clean them up” after the lawyers are done. No revisions.
Your superpower is communication. Theirs is the law. Law trumps communication.
[Read More]Writing requires that you try to reach your reader. Technical writing doubly so. And that’s the part that isn’t easy. There are obstacles, and you have to do the work of overcoming all of them all of the time. Simultaneously.
Here are five of my rules for technical writers.
You have to understand your topic.
In a lot of life, in conversations and in writing, you can have a vague idea of how something works. (For example, you can put gasoline in a car without understanding how the gas fuels an engine.) That’s not true in technical writing. You cannot explain what you do not understand. You have to know exactly what the ideas are, and what all the words mean. Although you don’t have time to become a subject matter expert in everything you write about, you must invest the time and brain-strain to become a student of the subject. And you must resist the seductive pleadings from non-writers to just clean up the writing of someone who does understand the topic. You’re not there to give a polish to writing that you do not understand. You’re there to explain. You have to take that commitment seriously.
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