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	<title>blog @ spacebarpress &#187; Dev Guides</title>
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	<description>Life as a wannabe freelance writer</description>
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		<title>The Giddiness of Technical Writing</title>
		<link>http://spacebarpress.com/blog/2008/04/the-giddiness-of-technical-writing/</link>
		<comments>http://spacebarpress.com/blog/2008/04/the-giddiness-of-technical-writing/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:40:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Julia</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[TW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Working]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dev Guides]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[new work]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[You know you&#8217;re a technical writer when you get excited about writing a Developer Guide. This week I&#8217;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 [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>You know you&#8217;re a technical writer when you get excited about writing a Developer Guide. This week I&#8217;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 <u>excited about it.</u> While I enjoy handling style guides and process-type documents, I discovered that I missed working on actual technical documents like Developer Guides.</p>
<p>This one&#8217;s a particularly interesting one, since it&#8217;s forcing me to exercise all of my TW muscles.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Restructuring</strong>: The document suffered from being unfocused, as it meandered from topic to topic.</li>
<li><strong>Rewriting</strong>: It was originally written by someone whose command of the English language isn&#8217;t that great, so the language had to be redone to be understood.</li>
<li><strong> Re-Styling</strong>: I had to reapply a new version of our department&#8217;s document template to it. This was the &#8220;simple&#8221; part of the project.</li>
</ul>
<p>The Restructuring portion of the show is taking the longest time, although it&#8217;s complicated by the Rewriting task. Sometimes the language problems are getting in the way of the Restructuring since I&#8217;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.</p>
<p>All in all I spent about 4 days working on this document before delivering it back to the managing author. She&#8217;s actually going to add more content to it, however needed to have it &#8220;massaged&#8221; before she could really see what was going on. I look forward to finishing off this Developer Guide as it&#8217;ll go a long way to helping out the developers work with this new aspect of our system.</p>
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