What are some good technical writing skills that I should include in my writing style?

The study of rhetorical devices is a good way to learn to understand the structure of language. You probably remember these rhetorical devices from high school English: Metaphor Simile Understatement You may have to stop and think about exactly what these mean: Alliteration Onomatopoeia Hyperbole But what the heck are these? Chiasmus Metanoia Zeugma And these sound borderline pornographic: Dirimens Copulatio Conduplicatio Climax These are all useful rhetorical devices that, handled correctly, can enliven your writing by adding variety. If you want to develop your writing chops a little more, here's a handy online reference: http://virtualsalt.com/rhetoric.htm Be careful. You're about to become a writing geek. Have fun. Jack Price

Hats off to those in the technical writing career! It must be one of the most under-appreciated forms of art! If you write a novel and sell a million copies - you know people appreciated your work. If you are a tech writer - you at best may come to know how many folks downloaded a pdf or viewed an html page you wrote. How do you evolve these user guides and keep them fresh? Yonyx offers a platform for publishing interactive guides that are created by (among others) tech writers. The information is presented to customers interactively along multiple pathways & Authors use traversal analytics and context sensitive feedback from users to evolve the content. Check it out at http://corp.yonyx.com or watch this video http://vimeo.com/100659869

It's one thing to be good at writing and another thing to manage writing assignments. Christina hartmann, in her answer, has pretty much covered all the important aspects of writing styles. So, in my answer, I have listed the skills to be included in your writing style that will help you manage (again, manage) publishing projects efficiently: Keep the maintenance cost in mind - It is easy to add an image or other such details in your document. But it is strategic to think about the maintenance cost of adding images and updating them overtime. Most of the documents we write gets updated every now and then, so, updating documents is a major cost. So, draft your content in such a way that it explains everything as expected and reduces maintenance costs. For example, product names and product release numbers change every release and it is better to use the concept of variables for such terms. That is, you define and place a product-name variable in your document and have all the variables in your document at some central location. So as the product release changes, you just have to re-define the value of that single variable that might be used multiple times in the documentation. Produce and own style guides - Unless you have a designated editorial team in your organization, producing and owning the style guide is a technical writing job. You must manage your style guides for all the writers to use. Style decisions must be made to suite the writers to write efficiently. For example, if you see that your technical documents extensively use APIs or methods and classes. Then, for consistency throughout the documentation and efficiency of writers, you can choose to define a template for topics that describe APIs/methods/classes. This skill is more towards maintaining a writing style for a team of writers. That's it. Good luck writing and managing publishing assignments.

In regard to Cristina Hartmann's comment, I would add that it is important that you don't expand your vocabulary too much. It is vital that you only use words that are in common use by your target market - it is all very well using a word to reduce the sentence length, but not if readers don't understand it.Also, don't overuse the same term, because that repetition can become jarring. Don't use similes or metaphors!!! They can be mistranslated or make no sense in other cultures/languages. They can also be misinterpreted by end users. Colin Campbell's comments on bullet points and consistency are spot-on. REMEMBER - manuals and online help are non-linear. People rarely read them front to back or in order. As such, each section needs to be 'stand-alone' as much as possible, with references to other related sections.

Keep it short, to-the-point, and simple. Use the active voice whenever possible. Learn how to bullet and indent for effect to make information easier to scan. These have always helped me as a writer and editor.

Simple, think like your reader and write the content or subject in a way you would like to read. And in your spare time, you may like to read one of my most popular blogs: http://kingoranges.com/our-17-reasons-to-not-become-a-technical-writer/.

To me the most important thing is to include one and one only idea in a sentence. Don't be afraid of the full stop or of repeating your subject in each sentence. Bullet or numbered points are indispensable. Consistency in term usage is essential. Create the Table Of Contents first and then fill in the content under the headings. This implies you have fully researched your topic before you begin.

Here are fifteen you should focus on to develop your tech writing skills. See if this helps. Ivan