Become a Technical Writer, and Work at Home
A Home Business Article Contributed by Philippe Nicolitch
Combine Your Writing Skills and Your Technical Expertise, and Work at Home!
With a good command of the English language, you may be able to turn your writing skills into a full time position where you'll even be able to work at home.
Many companies require technical documentation to be produced as part of a large project or on an ad-hoc basis, thus not justifying a full time employee on staff.
Technical writers can very often work at home, as long as they have a way to keep in touch with the department that produces the product they are documenting. Technical writing usually regroups these three major aspects:
Business Requirements, a document that describes what the client needs the product to do.
Functional Specifications, a document that describes how the product will function from a technical standpoint
User Documentation, a document that describes how the product works from a user's point of view.
Work at Home and Write Business Requirements
If you work at home as a Business Requirements writer, your job is to understand the client's needs for the new product. You may need to meet with your client on a regular basis, but most of your job can be performed back in your living room. Essentially, you need to understand what functionality is required from a user's big picture standpoint.
For example a business requirement for a new rice cooker may be: The technical department shall develop a new rice cooker, which will cook rice in less than 5 minutes, alert the user if the amount of water is insufficient during the cooking process, and will let the user add water. There shall be a possibility to see the rice from the outside of the cooker without opening it during the cooking process, etc...
Work at Home and Write Functional Specifications
If you work at home as a Functional Specifications writer, your job is to translate the need of the client into a language that an engineer or programmer will easily understand. Here again, you may have to meet occasionally with the technical team or at least be on the phone with them.
Here is an idea of what a Functional Specification for our rice cooker could be: The Rice Cooker project shall include a digital clock model XyZ located on the front of the cooker, with the ability to control the rice cooking time. The rice cooker will be designed as a pressure cooker so the rice can be cooked in less than 5 minutes by default, etc...
Work at Home and Write User Documentation
This is the last part of the job that you can complete from your living room if you work at home.
Here your role is to document the usage of the product, once it is completed, from a user standpoint. This about the last time you bought a new kitchen appliance and how many times you had to read the documentation. Was it easy to understand? Did it guide you through all the options? Did you learn to use the new appliance easily and successfully?
