When I was first hired by a company that specialized in writing technical reports, I thought that it would be easy for me. After all, I had a strong background in writing and an even stronger one in science and engineering. I could basically conquer any area of technical knowledge there was, and do it with style and ease. Although I had never had much experience in writing a technical report, I had done quite a few lab write-ups in school, and thought I knew how to transfer that into technical writing.

What really surprised me was that there was a lot to technical report writing that I did not know. Technical writing is both an art and a science, and it follows its own set of procedures. My job was to write guidebooks and manuals, and this required me to take various different processes apart piece-by-piece. I had never really been a very linear thinker, but writing technical reports required me to. In order to explain how to do something one step at a time, you have to be able to think like a teacher, and that was pretty new to me.

I decided to take a class on writing a technical report in my spare time. In the meantime, I faked it by working long hours and consulting a few technical writing services when I got really stuck and was not able to complete what I was working on. At first it was pretty hard work, and I felt lost most of the time, but soon I began to get the hang of it. It was not long before I was writing technical reports like an old hand and consistently delivering projects before the deadline.

What I learned most from the experience was that understanding the kind of writing demanded from you is more important than having the technical background. If you are pretty smart and have someone god briefing you, you can pick up the tech skills as you go along. The writing, however, is a lot harder to get piecemeal. A lot of companies will have primers that tell you about their style of writing technical reports, but even so they expect you to come in with a lot of knowledge about how to do it. It pays to have this knowledge going in. It is much better to have it ahead of time than to have to take night classes.