About Me
I am primarily a person who enjoys helping others learn! I have been a software technical writer for over 15 years and my goal with this blog is to help other technical writers become more technical, so that they can have the confidence and knowledge to understand their products better, and in turn help their users more.
I have always had a love of writing and a curiosity to understand how things work. I am the kind of person who always reads the manual :) I feel that technical writers are very often undervalued because often they are seen as people who simply take information from the software developers and "make it pretty"! In my opinion, this is far from the truth, as a truly technical writer can collect information for highly complex software from multiple different sources (written descriptions, demos, user stories, etc.) and combine it and translate it into documentation that is easy to read, easy to understand, and easy for a user to relate to. This ability of technical writers to produce comprehensive software documentation results in users being able to achieve their goals with a software product much more quickly, and leaves them with the impression that the software is much easier to use.
I've always believed that the best documentation is written by technical writers who have a combination of good writing skills, a simple and consistent writing style, and critically the confidence and ability to dive in and play around with complex software to get a true and full understanding of how it works. If you can't put yourself in the user's shoes by understanding what they want to achieve and how best to achieve it with the software you are documenting, then you are failing your users.
I live in a rural town in County Cavan, Ireland with my husband, daughter, and three Rex cats who regularly supervise my work!
