Technical Writing Skills

Communication skills

I use the term "communications" skills in a very broad sense. For the purpose of this article, communication skills include, but are not limited to, the following:

Knowledge of grammar, proper language usage and acceptable writing standards (outside of the guidelines developed by the companies technical writers works for)
Interpersonal skills such as empathy, negotiations, persuasion, and just a general ability to socialize
Interviewing techniques

A knowledge of your language or the language in which you will be writing is core to your communications skills as a technical writer. You must know proper grammar as well as how to express things in an easy-to-understand manner. This becomes especially important when your job is to "translate" highly technical, or even theoretical, content into something that anyone can understand.

You're in the business of gathering information from people and presenting it to people. This means that you must not only be able to interact with people, you must also understand people. You'll be gathering information from people who may not have the time, energy, or desire to provide you with what you need. A bit of socializing, negotiation and even persuasion gives you the edge you need to get information from those people. Technical writing is a social profession.

Empathy allows you to intuit the user needs. With empathy, you can predict difficult aspects of a service or product and devote greater focus on those aspects.

Finally, you will benefit greatly from interviewing techniques. Whether you're talking to subject matter experts or end users, you need to know the right questions to ask and the way to ask them. Good interviewing skills enable you to gain access to information that might have been overlooked, or give you the ability to pluck necessary feedback from a group of users.