As the New Year is coming, it’s time to consider upgrading your skills and building new ones. Here, I share some top technical writing skills.

Design Skills

High-quality design is the main part of effective documentation. Clear structure, highlighting important information, convenient navigation, images, screenshots — all these elements make your users read your documentation gladly. However, it’s not enough to just add a screenshot to a topic, it also requires skills and knowledge of different tools since you need to add some visual elements to your screenshots like arrows, highlighting and so on.

This year, try something new. There are many tools that allow you to create great screenshots, pictures, diagrams and so on. For example, you can create graphics using Markdown and boost your skills: Diagrams in Documentation (Markdown Guide). Here are more professional tools for creating visual content:

Design skills also requires knowledge of professional technical writing tools because, in my opinion, MS Word is not the tool where you can experiment to upgrade your skills. If you want to try a new help authoring tool, here is a list of popular ones: Software Tools for Technical Writing.

Communication Skills

Communication skills are what you can’t build instantly — there are no courses that will help you. Of course, you can read some relevant books that contains communication techniques but practise is what you really need since people are different — they can be busy, they can forget something or they can even dislike you because of some subjective reasons, and techniques from books are universal. The right decision to practice your communication skills is to visit meetups and conferences. There are many tech writing conferences that I highlight here, in my blog, so stay tuned — I’ll share 2020 conferences soon.

Writing Skills

Writing skills are what you should improve every day to make your documentation effective. Books and courses may not be enough for this purpose. To improve your writing, use readability metrics.

Readability metrics help to indicate the accessibility of text, indicating how easy it is to read and understand. So, due to them, your texts will be easy-to-interpret and users will gladly read your documentation. On the Internet, you can find some third-party tools, for example, WebFX or Readability Analyzer.

As for me, I use a professional technical writing tool — ClickHelp that already has the readability metrics inside, so I just write the content and it instantly shows me the result according to the most popular metrics. It also provides me with the score standards. Here is how it looks: