Technical Writing
Manuals, SOPs, handbooks, and process documentation, complex material rendered into language people can actually use.
Most technical documentation is written by the person who understands the system best and explains it worst. The result reads like a transcript of someone thinking out loud, accurate, exhaustive, and impossible to follow. The cost shows up later, in the questions, the errors, and the training time that never goes down.
I write technical material from the other side of the desk. I spent years in manufacturing operations, including serving as chief financial officer for a substantial manufacturing company, where I wrote the procedures, designed the processes, and watched what happened when documentation was clear versus when it wasn't. I know how a process actually runs on the floor, not just how it looks in a diagram.
What I write
Standard operating procedures. Step-by-step procedures that a new hire can follow without a supervisor standing over them, and that hold up to an audit.
Manuals and handbooks. Operations manuals, employee handbooks, equipment and product manuals, organized so the reader can find the one thing they need without reading the other forty pages.
Process design and documentation. Not just writing down a process, but examining it first. Where it breaks, where it's redundant, where a step exists only because it always has. I document what should happen, and I'll flag what shouldn't.
Knowledge bases and reference material. The internal documentation that lets a team stop asking the same questions, written once, well, so it actually gets used.
Why a writer with operations experience
Good technical writing is a translation problem. The expert has the knowledge; the reader has the task. The job is getting the first into the second with nothing lost on the way across. My background in neuroscience and cognitive science isn't a footnote here, it's the part that matters when the whole point is getting information to land in someone else's mind, under pressure, the first time they read it.
How a project works
Technical work is priced per project and can include consultations, process design, and staff research, we scope it on the discovery call. Sometimes the right answer is a single SOP; sometimes it's a full documentation system. Either way, you get clean, usable documents, in the format your team already works in.
Related
Documentation often travels with other writing. See editing for cleaning up existing manuals, or ghostwriting for turning institutional knowledge into a book. Questions? The FAQ covers process and timelines.