About Author

How do I become a technical Author?

This is my most frequently asked question, and a difficult one to answer. I can only tell you how I got into it. I have spent my school life (and a good deal of my passion for writing, sometimes I used to write on the piece of paper and sometimes on the tree leaves) as a writer of some form or another. When I entered college, I wrote for college Magazines (Still I remember the topic was AIDS) . It was exciting, interesting, and very stressful. When I chose a major in college, I finally settled on creative writing, with a minor in English. I took very few technical courses in college and I have never taken a course in technical writing.

What I did do was work with computers programming, constantly. I got my first computer when I was 15 years old and I have never been without one since. In high school and at the beginning of college, I took some programming classes, but only about three of them. The rest of my computer skills I acquired either at home or on the job. When I transferred from my Govt college to the Technical University Lucknow, I got a job in their computer department in the ‘as a software developer’. There, I was exposed to just about every platform available at the time (C#, .Net, ASP.Net Java, Sql Server 2000, HTML, Oracle, PHP and MYSQL) and there are hundreds of software programs. I enjoyed it and I. While doing so, I wrote some short manuals and performed other various desktop publishing functions. After college, I had a series of jobs, all of them either computer, publishing, or writing related, until I eventually found myself out of work and needing a career path. I had done some technical writing as part of my past jobs, and I decided that I should dedicate my efforts towards building a career there.

Despite being broke, I managed to work FrameMaker, and train myself on the package, adding that to my skills in PageMaker. I also taught myself HTML programming and learned to read C# and other languages that I had not visited in many years. I sent out over 500 resumes and refused to settle for more than what I wanted. I used up all of my unemployment and dug myself deeply to get something.

Then, I received two job offers. The first one was to work as an Technical Writer for my Multi National Company. It paid as much as I can survive myself and family living in Delhi/NCR. I was willing to take it, and would have, but right as I was about to I got a call from a contract agency I had sent my resume to. Another local company was looking for a technical writer for a six-month contract. It paid better, but much of that got sucked up when I opted for salary and benefits such as medical and Provident Funds, holidays, sick days and vacation days. In the end, I started among one of them. As my experience has grown, so has my pay.

Above article is Personal.