Is technical writing a dying field?
Overview
We keep hearing that technical writing is a dying field. However, in reality, it still seems to be an in-demand thing that people want to continually pay great money to. If you are just starting your technical writing career, it is always better to ignore the Googles about whether your fledgling career is dying.
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Eventually, all jobs in the market will go away and the world will mostly be run by robots and there will be only a bunch of people that can fix the robots when they break.
So, in that sense, technical writing will be a dying career, but like, so is the entire rest of the economy?
It is dumb to be worried about how long it will be before tech writing as a career is annihilated by advances in technology. That’s goanna takes a lot of time from now.
These are some of the arguments that we hear as to why this career is dying a slow and tragic death.
• The documentation should live with the code
Have you ever heard this? The documentation should live with the code. The greater part of you could have heard this a ton.
Most of the technical writers are cool with it, they aren’t allergic to code. Moreover, they can write in whatever tools you need. Furthermore, they’re flexible.
• Better UI create less of a need for documentation
Seriously, this shouldn’t be a matter of concern because most technical writer services write about spectacularly designed applications. The UI and the user experience provided are top-notch, such as super slick award-winning stuff.
However, there are still a lot of guides that require updates because of the continually changing UI, and we have more new features coming out all the time. So, get out here with this ridiculous notion that UIs will ever be so self-explanatory that users will not need additional details from the documentation.
• Automatically generated documentation is a thing now
There are advances in tooling. Swagger, for example, is wonderful and is now viewed as sort of the highest quality level for API documentation.
Assuming that it's presented to clients, does it actually should be investigated after it's created? Totally. All in all, have you seen auto-generated news articles that are like a sentence long, riddled with mistakes, and generally fail to explain much of anything? Or then again have you at any point attempted a speech-to-text app? It’s terrible. The technology’s not there yet.
• Developers can draft it all by themselves
If there’s one thing about developers, it’s that most of them are not confident in their ability to write for a customer-facing audience. Are there some developers who are great at writing? 100% yes there are but understand this, human error is a thing, and technical writers all have varying degrees of OCD about grammatical mistakes. They simply do, it’s what they love.
Bottomline
So, the bottom line is technical writing is more than simply editing. There is a huge demand for people who can sit in a room with someone for an hour, and come out of that room with well-crafted documentation that can be consumed by multiple audience types.
If you wish to become a technical writer, make sure you do your research and understand that the technical writing career is not dying. Technical writing services will still be a boom, and technical writer services are amazing if you have an interest in the field.
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