On Writing Technical Content for Tech Companies

* Top misconceptions about writing technical content
* Before you write technical content
* While you write content
* Landing your first technical gig
* Free tools you should have

Transcript

1. Technical Writing as a Side Hustle Lessons learned from writing technical blog posts for tech companies
2. Agenda ❏ Top misconceptions ❏ Before you write ❏ While you write ❏ Landing your first gig ❏ Free tools you should have
3. Acknowledgement ❏ Abraham Enyo-one Musa ( Thanks for pushing for this)
4. About Me ❏ Software Engineer (Based in Germany) ❏ AWS Community Builder ❏ Creator of HubOfML's Newsletter ❏ Technical Writer (Serverless, Containers, Machine Learning, AWS, and Occasionally GCP @samueljabiodun @abiodunjames
5. Top Common Misconceptions
6. ❏ I'm not good enough ❏ Writers must always write original pieces ❏ Writing takes a lot of time ❏ Writing does not take time ❏ Good writing is about the use of fancy and big grammars
7. Before You Write
8. What's the Point • Understand your objectives. • What should readers take from it? • Teach or offer advice?
9. Do Your Research • No one knows it all • You will gain perspectives by reading opinions from others • Writing becomes easy when researched well
10. An Outline is Important • It helps you stay on track • It helps you narrow down your research • It's a contract between you and the client
11. The Outline is Ready. What's Next?
12. While You Write
13. Less is more ❏ Compress what you mean into the fewest words possible ❏ Don't state what it's obvious ❏ Remove weeds
14. Take special attention to the lead ❏ The most important paragraph is the first ❏ Buy readers and keep them sold till the end
15. Don't leave readers hanging ❏ Lead readers to action items ❏ What should readers take away with them?
16. Avoid passive voice when possible The goat ate the yam is better than The yam was eaten by the goat
17. Make it simple It may rain is better than We're anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation
18. The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. – William Zinsser
19. ❏ Every word that serves no function ❏ Every long word that could be a short word ❏ Every adverbs that already carries the same meaning that's already in the verbs
20. Be cohesive ❏ Use cohesive devices
21. Landing Your First Technical Writing Gig
22. Warning! There are no hard written rules, but if you do these, you might increase the odds.
23. Write. Write. Write. ❏ Share how you tackled that production bug ❏ Share what you just learned about AWS ❏ Just build your portfolio (medium, dev.to, personal blog)
24. Partner with established technical writers ❏ You will learn a ton ❏ You may also get connected
25. Use online marketplace ❏ Fiverr ❏ Upwork, etc
26. Share what you write Nobody lights a lamp and put it under the bushel – Bible
27. Free Tools I Use
28. ❏ Title Case Converter ❏ Draw.io ❏ Plagiarism Detector ❏ Grammarly ❏ Word Counter ❏ Text to Speech Reader
29. Questions
30. Thank you.