Technical Writing image by Nickobec
Are you nearing the end of your degree but don’t know what type of writing career to pursue? There are many demands for you talents – journalism, copywriting, magazine article writer, fiction book author. But if you have a technical mind and enjoy the sciences, why not consider a career as a technical writer?
So what is a technical writer? Technical writing is the use of basic technical knowledge of a product or service and understanding of the terminology and language associated with that particular industry utilized to provide documentation on all aspects of the product or service.
Usually, it is grouped into the marketing department of a company, since it is involved in much of the literature provided to both consumers and professionals who install, setup, and maintain whatever product is in question. However, other areas of marketing are geared toward promoting a product for sale, while the technical writing department is focused on factual information only, providing information on the inner workings of the device, as well as troubleshooting material.
Technical writing can involve producing white papers, installation instructions, troubleshooting guides, wiring information, and other detailed documents involving the functionality and usage of a particular product. While it is not usually necessary for a technical writer to be familiar with every aspect of a product or device in order to prepare such documentation, technical writing requires that you be able to decipher and make use of the terms that arise in the application of the product or service on a daily basis within that industry. This means having a concept of the entire industry in which the product is marketed.
For example, if you are a technical writer in the telecom industry, you should be familiar with the usage of terms like “switch” and “server” in relation to the products provided by the company you work for, as well as maintain comprehension of several acronyms that you would use on a daily basis in your technical writing, including abbreviations like CDMA and NTSC. Technical writing is a great field to enter, if you have any kind of intimate knowledge of technical and technological industries
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For a non-technical person, the most boring article you can read in the world is a technical document. Who wants to get bogged down with all that technical information? This represents a major hurdle for any technical writer. Just how do you make a technical essay interesting? The answer is to apply that information and show the benefits of what you are discussing. Here is an example of this strategy in a reader submitted article I recieved today -
The Advantages Of New Fibre Laser Welding Techniques
A fuel cell is an electro chemical energy conversion device, which produces electricity from external supplies of fuel (on the anode side) and oxidant (on the cathode side). These react in the presence of an electrolyte to produce energy.
Since a typical fuel cell produces less than one volt, in practical application cells are ‘stacked’ in parallel to create a useful voltage. Thus a typical fuel cell is made up of many thin sheets, usually of stainless steel, which must be welded together to form the fuel cell stack.
Welding of the plates is by far the most time consuming process involved in the manufacture of fuel cells – there is about one meter of welding required for every single plate in every single fuel cell stack – that is about 400m of welding for each eco-car. Optimising the welding process offers the opportunity to make significant savings in the cost of production of fuel cells.
The issues here are all related to the difficulty of achieving a small, clean, reliable weld at viable production speeds using traditional laser welding techniques. To solve these problems, the leading-edge manufacturers are now looking to fibre laser welding technology.
The key advantages of fibre lasers over other laser technologies are its high beam quality, energy & power stability, giving higher power density and a greater breadth of control, as well as its low total cost of ownership. The high beam quality of the fibre laser enables the beam to be focused to a small spot with a correspondingly high energy density. This enables very fast and efficient processing, yielding welds with a high aspect ratio. Compared with other laser sources, the fibre laser can produce welds with significantly lower heat input resulting in less distortion of the welded plates. The high energy stability, typically +/-0.5%, gives welds of consistent profile and penetration with extremely low levels of weld root porosity.
It is recognised that other laser technologies are capable of making such welds, but the fibre laser offers a solution that welds faster with higher quality at a lower operational running cost. “We believe that the cost-performance capability of a standard 200W fibre laser will act as an enabling technology in the battle to drive down production costs of tomorrows fuel cells” said John Tinson.
The fuel cell plate requires a high aspect ratio weld (typically 3:1 or 4:1) in order minimise heat input to the plate and keep distortion to an acceptable level. The beauty of the fibre laser is that it readily achieves this with spot sizes of less than 200 m. As a result, distortion of the plates, a potentially cumulative problem when the plates are stacked, can be minimised.
Metallographic analysis of ‘key-hole’ and high aspect ratio welds often reveals problems with weld porosity, particularly in the root of the weld. In the fuel cell application the integrity of the weld is vitally important and a fully hermetic seal is a prime requirement. A poor quality weld could lead to serious performance problems over the life of the fuel cell, or even leakage of hydrogen or other fluids. Experience has shown that the fibre laser, with its exceptionally high power density at the work-piece, is particularly good producing consistently reliable, non-porous welds.
Another problem noted by some manufacturers using YAG or CO2 lasers is the possibility of ‘humping’ of the weld, when the laser is operated at high production speeds. This is the phenomenon whereby the inherent fluid instability of the melt pool at high weld speed creates a ‘hump’. It is seen as a problem by some manufacturers because it can limit production speed, but it is not a problem with a standard 200W fibre laser, even at speeds of up to five or six metres / minute it can produce over 2,500km of weld per annum.
In a production environment fibre lasers have a reputation from extremely high up times and have no operational consumables, unlike other laser sources such as Nd:YAG lasers that require a periodic change of flash lamps or CO2 lasers which need supply of consumable gases. Additionally the high electrical efficiency of fibre lasers – up to ten times more efficient in power consumption than Nd:YAG equivalents mean that they offer significantly lower running costs. They can be used for welding ‘on demand’ unlike some other types of lasers with no need for warm-up, further reducing energy consumption and run through scrap. As fibre lasers are sealed units with no lamps that need changing or mirrors to realign, they have a very low maintenance overhead, yielding savings of thousands of £ per annum per laser.
Fibre lasers offer fuel cell manufacturers an attractive “green manufacturing” technology, providing high productivity/high integrity welding with low operating costs for this critical application.
Results from leading manufacturers in this field show that fibre laser welding will play a significant role in tipping the balance for fuel cell technology from a ‘promising idea’ to a serious commercial solution to the world’s energy-usage problems.
Consistency of a technical documentation is what creates that subliminal sense of trust and confidence in the end-users.
Someone once quipped: “it ain’t technical documentation if it ain’t boring.” This of course is not literally true since I always found technical documents very interesting indeed.
However, this quip reflects the truth that a technical document must be “boringly consistent” in order to be taken seriously. I could also say “religiously consistent” as the phrase goes, but I thought I might inadvertently offend someone and that certainly is not my intention here.
Just ask yourself: would you trust an airplane maintenance manual that has missing page numbers, has chapter headings printed in different fonts and sizes, has differently formatted figure captions for consecutively printed figures (like “Figure 2-14″ on one page, and “FIGURE 15″ on next)?
Consistency all starts with a document TEMPLATE.
It is harder to shift between different page templates if you are using MS Word as your main text editing program, and much easier if you are using Framemaker or InDesign since the last two are built on the “Master Pages” concept. But a page template is what you definitely must have.
When you have a template, you have consistent margins, sidebars, headers and footers, for starters. You have consistent page numbering and column, and page gutter(s) if you have more than one column.
If your text editor allows you to create Master Pages, I’d recommend you to create a document template starting off with the following 5 types of pages (assuming you are writing a book):
1) Front Cover.
2) First Page.
3) Right Page.
4) Left Page.
5) Back Cover.
And it wouldn’t hurt at all of you design templates (Master Pages) for the following types of special pages as well:
6) Front Matter.
7) TOC.
List of Tables and Figures.
9) Index.
Have a template first before structuring your information. It’s a must. “Don’t leave home without it,” as one credit card commercial used to say.
Thanks to http://www.learntechnicalwriting.com for the content. Article Source.