Effective technical communication

Effective, targeted documentation can save your company thousands of pounds.

It's natural for people to be enthusiastic about new systems or products and to start using them straight away, before they completely understand all their features. People often don't start looking for instructions until they come across something that they don't understand. Unfortunately, what they find is frequently inadequate, irrelevant, or poorly written. Well planned and well executed technical writing, delivered by a professional technical writer, can make a huge difference.

Making your products and systems easy and safe to use is a key to business success. When your staff and your customers understand what your product or service can do, and how best to use your product to get their job done, they have fewer complaints and make fewer calls to technical support. Your costs can fall dramatically as a result.

The key to effective technical communication is understanding the audience, and understanding the tasks they need to perform. My career in technical writing has focused on exactly this aspect of the communication cycle - knowing the audience and understanding their information needs. Once you fully understand your audience's point of view - or the points of view of all your different audiences - explaining the technology in ways that are useful and meaningful becomes easy.

Please contact me to discuss how I can help you with documentation products and services such as:

• Instruction manuals
• Information Design
• Product guides
• User interface review
• Training materials
• Documentation audit
• Marketing copy
• Documentation planning
• Brochures
• Audience analysis
• Reports
• User task analysis
• Newsletters
• Publication management
• Web site content