Any technical writers here?

Any technical writers here?

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I was one for five years or so. What?

Didja like it? Got some book recs?

It was ok. Pretty dead end within itself though. However, easy springboard into process writing/management/compliance and/or business analysis.

For books, unironically the Microsoft style guide. It's not exactly prose for the ages, and you won't produce a great novel through it, but it informs damn near every piece of contemporary technical style.

Otherwise, standards. Basically, pick a governance body or standards body and look up its style guide.

>pick a governance body or standards body and look up its style guide.

For example? Not sure what you mean exactly.

Tech writing is all about getting/interviewing to derive/researching content, making that content reasonable-human-readable, sensical, and flowing in a logical manner. Then you ensure that content is consistent within itself and across all content in your store. You do this part by having defined (or picked) a formal style guide, and by following the requirements laid out by whatever best practise your client or company or whatever has chosen. Like ISO, for example. Or NIST, or (ISC)2. Whatever.

It's also a profession you can't just step into, unless you've got something like a BA in English, journalism, or similar; or the same sort of experience/training that guarantees your general writing ability and grammarian background. Certification in Tech Writing is even better.

Thanks.

I work in a company that is trying to digitize, structure, and tag standards and regulations from all relevant issuers so that we can track changes and identify only the requirements that are relevant for our customers. My work for the past three or so years have been to find ways to turn PDFs into structured data.

I'm very curious to know more about the internal development process for making standards, so if anyone have worked with this please let me know.

For instance, it seems to me that a lot of standards are drafted in Word and converted to PDF for publishing, is this common or are other tools used? Also, why do you guys so often make pointless changes such as replacing words with other synonyms or making pointless arbitrary changes that have absolutely no impact on the requirement and seem to be done just to change something?

The last part might be because they are using a controlled language, such as Simplified Technical English. STE defines a dictionary of allowed words, and tries to give each word one and only one meaning to reduce misunderstanding. For example, instructions say to "cut the power" and some tech literally cuts the cord with scissors and gets shocked, so STE explicitly defines the word "cut" to mean the literal cutting with a tool, and disallows using it for anything else. To a native English speaker who is familiar with the local jargon, this probably seems pointless, but it aids non-native speakers and translation to other languages.

clear and concise prose