If you’d like to impress your clients better as a technical writer then you need to be constantly honing your business writing and technical writing skills.
Since most technical writing projects revolve around software documentation, if you want to become a professional technical writer, picking some coding skills by the side will for sure be a worthwhile investment.
The best place to get started learning technical writing is through the best technical writing courses and training online.
Once you take these courses you’ll learn how to inform your readers, address their concerns while still making your technical writing specific and straight to the point.
In this article, we are going to look at the best technical writing courses and certifications online to get you started.
By taking these tutorials you’ll learn the art API documentation, coding skills for writers, and how to write enterprise software documentation so that you are ready to take entry-level technical writing jobs.
1. Learn API Technical Writing: JSON and XML for Writers | Udemy
Would you like to launch a career in technical writing?
If so then you are going to like this technical writing training. It is in fact the first in a series of courses for technical writers who want to learn how to write API documentation.
It is one of the best technical writing courses online since it teaches you how to document structured data, while focusing on the two most popular structured data formats: JSON and XML.
So if you are completely new to API documentation, then this is a great place to start, because no previous programming experience is required. However, if you are already a technical writer with some programming experience, you’ll find it more of like a refresher on structured data.
By the end of this technical writing tutorial, you will understand what APIs are, why they are important, and how to read and document structured data.
2. Business Writing & Technical Writing Immersion | Udemy
Learning technical writing from an already highly rated course brings you a ton of advantages because it is confirmation that you’ll learn what you need to know to become a professional technical writer.
This program is one of the most highly rated business and technical writing courses online for the very reason that previous students have found it very instrumental in launching their technical writing careers.
Through this online course on Udemy, you learn the writing system that uses 12 steps and almost 60 practical techniques to walk you through from initial writing analysis to final copy, producing documents that succeed every time.
For each writing technique, the course instructor provides you with a tutorial with exercises and thoughtful answers.
There is also a separate section about writing professional emails, covering tenses, verbiage, and tone, just to help you get your English up to speed, especially if it is your second language.
3. Technical Writing: Quick Start Guides Online Class | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com
A quickstart guide in a technical environment is usually a short, getting-started document that often accompanies a product or software.
In this LinkedIn Learning course, writing instructor Leslie O’Flahavan explains the components, best writing practices, and overall strategy for creating a quickstart guide that helps readers easily find answers to their questions.
It is one of the best technical writing courses online as the instructor shares with you how to base your quickstart guide on your user manual or develop your guide by using customer feedback.
By taking this online course, you’ll also learn how to clearly identify the overall purpose of your technical guide, write clear headings, and use plain language that the layman easily understands.
Finally, there is also a section that covers the methods for effectively getting actionable feedback from subject matter experts and users to ensure that your technical guide is both accurate and useful.
4. Writing Skills for Engineering Leaders | Coursera
Someone new to tech might think that coders just write programs without the need to provide documentation to go along with their programs.
Even if you are an engineer, you should know that engineering leaders must also write extensively for their jobs, and your writing needs to be professional, reader-focused, and error-free.
In fact, what technical leaders write in particular can affect team productivity and the bottom line of your business, so the written communication that they create must be clear and concise.
In this technical writing course online, you’ll learn essential writing skills that you can apply in your daily activities on the job as an engineering leader.
Through this training, you’ll get to learn key principles in approaching various engineering genres, using the writing process to create quality documents, as well as making your writing clear and concise.
There is also a section on handling style, tone, and voice.
5. Learn API Technical Writing 2: REST for Writers | Udemy
This is the second course to the first course on this list.
It forms part of a series of courses for technical writers who want to learn how to write API documentation, and other forms of technical writing.
I’d recommend that you take the first course, if you haven’t, unless you are already very familiar with JSON and XML, and how to document them.
In this technical writing course you’ll learn how to document REST APIs. No programming experience is required, but technical writers with programming experience who want to know more about REST APIs will still find it useful.
REST (Representational State Transfer) is a popular style of web API, and it’s used to communicate data between devices and servers. Different data is contained in different parts of the API requests and responses, and this course explains what those different parts are and how to document them.
