Flexible Working Life

I saw a job advert for a freelance technical writer the other day and wondered what it  entailed.  How is the job of a freelance technical writer different to a run of the mill freelance writer?  I’m guessing that freelance technical writers have a specialism, presumably technical, and stick to it.  Whereas freelance writers can be writing Jezebels and tout for work wherever.

After some initial research it seems that there’s a lot more to being a freelance technical writer than I first thought.  It’s not just a case of writing instruction manuals or re-writing complicated text into an easy to understand format.  Oh no, the life of a freelance technical writer is much more involved.  However, I’ve found out that freelance technical writers do seem to get paid more, so it might be worth a deeper investigation.

I can’t really find a definitive job description of a freelance technical writer.  Largely because technical writing jobs can consist of many things, including exploring technical applications, experimenting with them and analysing them.  I think it largely depends on the type of freelance technical writer job that you want to apply for but from first looks it seems that there’s lots of investigating into programs and software before even thinking about writing.

It also seems that there’s more to the job than merely writing, you need to solve technical problems and test how programs function or don’t function as well as talking to business analysts, consumer research…oh the list goes on.

So after premliminary looks, it seems that being a freelance technical writer isn’t for me after all, I mean, it all looks too… dare I say, technical?