You know you’re a technical writer when you get excited about writing a Developer Guide. This week I’ve been helping out two of our developers create a Developer Guide for one section of our software. And I am excited about it. Yes, you heard me, I am excited about it. While I enjoy handling style guides and process-type documents, I discovered that I missed working on actual technical documents like Developer Guides.

This one’s a particularly interesting one, since it’s forcing me to exercise all of my TW muscles.

• Restructuring: The document suffered from being unfocused, as it meandered from topic to topic.
• Rewriting: It was originally written by someone whose command of the English language isn’t that great, so the language had to be redone to be understood.
• Re-Styling: I had to reapply a new version of our department’s document template to it. This was the “simple” part of the project.

The Restructuring portion of the show is taking the longest time, although it’s complicated by the Rewriting task. Sometimes the language problems are getting in the way of the Restructuring since I’m having trouble figuring out what the developer was trying to say. A quick 30-minute session with another developer helped solve a lot of the clarity issues, so that I could concentrate on restructuring the information better.

All in all I spent about 4 days working on this document before delivering it back to the managing author. She’s actually going to add more content to it, however needed to have it “massaged” before she could really see what was going on. I look forward to finishing off this Developer Guide as it’ll go a long way to helping out the developers work with this new aspect of our system.