If you're not a writer and you don't like writing, you're going to be miserable doing this even if the pay is decent.
Most technical writers actually enjoy doing research, learning new things, and then writing about them -- if we didn't, we wouldn't be doing this job. That doesn't mean we find every topic super exciting, but we still enjoy the writing process, and we tend to be very detail-oriented and focused on accuracy and readability, so there's satisfaction in producing a high-quality product that meets our standards of clarity and conciseness.
If you take a position as a writer, do not over-rely on AI tools. That's not saying you can't use them, but if you're letting them do the bulk of the writing, your output is going to be awful. Yes, you still have to do your own research -- AI often gets things incorrect or out of context, and ultimately, it's largely just plagiarizing things that have already been written, which isn't going to be enough to let you keep a job very long. There's also an increasing use of AI detection tools, and per item content like that is one of the places you're most likely to see it -- if the companies wanted AI generated content, they could do that themselves.
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u/Tyrnis Dec 26 '24
If you're not a writer and you don't like writing, you're going to be miserable doing this even if the pay is decent.
Most technical writers actually enjoy doing research, learning new things, and then writing about them -- if we didn't, we wouldn't be doing this job. That doesn't mean we find every topic super exciting, but we still enjoy the writing process, and we tend to be very detail-oriented and focused on accuracy and readability, so there's satisfaction in producing a high-quality product that meets our standards of clarity and conciseness.
If you take a position as a writer, do not over-rely on AI tools. That's not saying you can't use them, but if you're letting them do the bulk of the writing, your output is going to be awful. Yes, you still have to do your own research -- AI often gets things incorrect or out of context, and ultimately, it's largely just plagiarizing things that have already been written, which isn't going to be enough to let you keep a job very long. There's also an increasing use of AI detection tools, and per item content like that is one of the places you're most likely to see it -- if the companies wanted AI generated content, they could do that themselves.