The pushback against AI slop is making employers recognise the importance of skilled writing by humans so they are now hiring "storytellers":
"It’s so much more than a copywriter,” says one hirer: https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-desperately-seeking-storytellers-7b79f54e

Hopefully this will see a move beyond hiring copywriters to keyword stuff for SEO and AI, a move beyond judging skill by simplistic metrics such as number of boosts, likes etc. I hope that organisations will want professional writers who can identify target audiences and deliver meaningful material that will be valued by those audiences. This is true success, but may mean that the post or article might not get many clicks.

I hope that over time "storyteller" will not simply become a synonym for "copywriter".

Technical writers already provide this kind of skill when writing about technology, or health, or science, or digital humanities

#WriteTheDocs #TechWriting #TechnicalWriting #TechnicalWriters #DigitalHumanities

Addressing critical needs driven by the dynamic world of #techDocs, Manny Silva has created Docs as Tests, a system that integrates well-developed #techComms practices and a collection of engineering tooling to help #technicalWriters streamline and constantly improve their software #documentation and #QA work.

This was a fun chat with a deeply experienced Silicon Valley #content veteran. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/manny-silva/

i wonder if anyone wants to hire technical writers these days given that LLMs are mostly the talk now.

#technicalwriting #TechnicalWriters #information_technology #softwaredevelopment #llm #Documentation

"The good news is that the job market is going to recover as those owners of code progressively realize the limitations that are inherent to replacing the folks at the periphery with numb language models, something they’re already noticing when it comes to coding tasks. After a stint of degrowth that has felt way too long, companies will seek to grow again in a more sustainable fashion, a trend that will carry the need for better documentation with it.

The catch is that life in the periphery of tech will require AI augmentation and training. If past job offers emphasized API documentation and coding skills, in 2025 tech writers will have to be proficient operators of AI tools, both for writing in docs-as-code environments as for becoming coding associates, able to execute docs infrastructure and toolchain work. When done well, job interviews will ask writers to be able to use AI in writing tests in efficient, innovative ways.

If I’ve learned something this year is that the LLM-powered writing and coding isn’t going away. Technical writers will need to focus more on content strategy, information architecture, and tooling, and less on writing; at the same time, they’ll be expected to know how to use tools like Cursor’s composer mode to set up entire documentation sets in little time, and then iterate. As I explained in What’s a docs engineer, writers will continue specializing in two separate strains."

https://passo.uno/tech-writing-predictions-2025/

#TechnicalWriting #TechnicalWriters #LLMs #AI #GenerativeAI #DocsAsCode

We have been busy this year developing the idea of a Brick Docs Workshop designed to help IT engineers develop technical writing skills. This fun workshop uses Lego to identify writing and formatting techniques that help make instructions clearer.

We are running this workshop at the national technical writing conference in Melbourne next week. DM me if you want to attend - I can see if I can wangle some tickets.
#TechnicalWriters #WriteTheDocs #Melbourne

https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/australia/2024/workshop/

We are having a discussion about “what is a code example” for the purposes of evaluating the code examples in our documentation.

That is a surprisingly nuanced question!

Today I’m working on a document that attempts to answer the question. I’m up to 10 pages with 3 different axes for breaking down definitions:

- Code examples by persona type
- Code examples by information type
- Code examples by our build tooling

Curious if this topic would be of-interest to #TechnicalWriters and others?

I am feeling pretty happy after a good day's work. I put a lot of work into any meeting I organise. I always include a clear agenda and expected outcomes in the meeting invites. I do all the necessary fact finding and preparation before the meeting. Then I chair the meeting, ensuring everyone gets a chance to speak and no waffling or preventing work from finishing in the quest for perfection. Afterwards I send meeting notes with responsibilities for action clearly defined.

Today we had a meeting with senior engineers that could have gone for an hour, but I allocated half an hour because I knew I would do the meeting prep, so little time would be needed for fact finding in the meeting. Then because of all the meeting prep and clear meeting objectives we achieved what we needed and finished the meeting in 15 minutes! Two participants were able to use the bonus time to discuss another matter while the rest of the participants left the meeting early.

I put a lot of time and effort prior to the event to achieve a 15 minute meeting.

#TechnicalWriters #MeetingMinimalism

For the curious #TechnicalWriters out there who have heard me talking about our project to consolidate 9 sets of SDK docs into a single documentation set, I've just put up the month two project check-in blog post!

https://dacharycarey.com/2024/07/28/docs-consolidation-project-two-month-check-in/