Technical Writer (12-month contractor)

The Tech writer applies his/her skills after development is complete. He/she should be able to:

• Write the user manual for Domain APIs, with advice from the developer.
• Document APIs, with familiarity with Swagger or a similar API tool.
• Document the platform or application for internal/external technical users. Individuals outside the platform org should be able to gain a full understanding of the platform or application from this documentation alone in a self-service manner.
• Write promotional material ( news letter/ Powerpoint or Keynote presentation) that describes the technical features of the platform or application.

The basic skills of a technical writer include the following:

• Possess a strong facility with the English language.
• Understand sentence structure: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex.
• Have the knowledge to differentiate between an infinitive and a participle.
• Be able to name the three cases of English nouns (nominative, possessive, objective), know when each case is used, and give examples of each case.
• Understand the three degrees of adjectives (positive, comparative, and superlative) and describe how comparative and superlative differ.
• Understand how perfect tenses of verbs are different from regular tenses.
• Understand punctuation, for example, know when to use a semicolon.
• Understand how to apply numbered lists vs. bullet lists and how to use parallel grammatical structure for list items.

A technical writer can work more productively if he/she has related though peripheral knowledge in the following areas:

Good facility with:

• Excel, Word, and PowerPoint
  • Numbers, Pages, and Keynote
  • A graphics program such as Photoshop or Apple Preview
  • Confluence or similar document management system.

Familiarity with:

• Markup languages such as HTML and XML
• Data interchange formats such as .csv
• Principles of writing UX strings
• Product development lifecycle including the rudiments of QA testing
• JIRA or similar ticketing system.
• Basic understanding of user interface design, especially affordances.