Getting into technical writing

[metalcore]

I am a geek and I have a flair for writing, infact I have always excelled at writing in school, so I was thinking perhaps its time I tried something that I wanted to a long time ago, and that is of course technical writing.

How and where does one start, if anyone knows please share

I don't have a portfolio, only my knowledge, skills and expertise in the areas of electronics, IT etc etc. I have been thinking of starting a blog but work has kept me busy.

 

[bdt]

I am a geek and I have a flair for writing, infact I have always excelled at writing in school, so I was thinking perhaps its time I tried something that I wanted to a long time ago, and that is of course technical writing.

How and where does one start, if anyone knows please share

I don't have a portfolio, only my knowledge, skills and expertise in the areas of electronics, IT etc etc. I have been thinking of starting a blog but work has kept me busy.

You are aware for the written word to be successful it requires both the author and the (love2hate'em, hate2love'em) editor ..and that you will be in need of one? But, levity aside, once upon a twice (at the Computer Faire/Linuxworld IIRC) I stumbled across an outfit that farms out writing work to independents, effectively tech. writing on a contract basis; the memory is telling me they were based in Cresta, JHB at the time.

 

[sn3rd]

What medium are you thinking of using? If you are thinking of self-publishing, or anything like that, you might want to look into TeX for typesetting. Excellent for mathematical type writing (formulae, figures, etc), and you get to focus on the content rather than the formatting. TeX FTW!

LaTeX:
http://www.latex-project.org/

If you're on Linux, get texlive:
Ubuntu:

sudo aptitude install texlive

A good resource to get you started on what TeX is, what LaTeX is, what typesetting is, why you would want to typeset and how to get started: http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

 

[ObeyTheDiode]

It largely depends on what audience you are writing for. A accredited scientific journal requires a different writing style than writing for say a PC magazine.

I could only recommend reading literature of the type you're wanting to write.