National Day on Writing

October 20 is the National Day on Writing, a day to celebrate writing in all its forms. At Technically We Write, we always look to highlight different kinds of technical and professional writing, and a month ago, we asked you about what do you write and what tools do you use to write them? This is what our community had to say:

What you write, and how you write

Byron Patterson writes how-to documents:

How to guides for doing a task in Fonteva (association management software that runs on top of Salesforce). Word and Snagit because a picture is a thousand words. Then they get posted in Sharepoint.

Tomo Lennox creates presentations:

As a technical trainer/Agile coach, I do a lot of PowerPoint. I try to integrate Zoom features to make it more interactive. I also do a lot of diagrams. I used to use PowerPoint or Word, or Visio if it was available. Now I use Draw.io. I used to steal art from the web for internal presentations, then I would have to find a way to use hand drawings or expensive artists if I presented it publicly. No I can do custom art with AI. A picture may, or many not, be worth a thousand words, but it does help communicate complex concepts.

Thomas Barnett writes documentation:

Technical docs, and code. Oh, my fingers!

Jac Campbell writes updates:

I write a lot of status reports and updates for customers and internally. I use PowerPoint and graphs from Asana, and both tools for many things, including reports, presentations, diagrams, etc. I also use other tools, like Miro.

Jim Hall writes articles:

I love to write all kinds of articles, especially how-to articles. I started by writing for websites and magazines like Linux Journal and it grew from there. I write the first draft for most things in a plain text editor, using Markdown, and convert to whatever format I need to use on the other end.

I've written so much that I've also started writing longer books. At first, these books were collections of essays and articles I'd already written elsewhere, but more recently I've started writing professionally. I just finished one book about markup (currently in pre-production, due out later this year) and I'm currently writing another book about technical writing tools. I use LibreOffice to write my books because it's so powerful, yet easy to use.

Robin Bland uses DITA:

I write a lot of different things with a lot of different tools. Most of my work is either in Word or with DITA. Writing with DITA is unlike any other kind of writing, you have to think about how you can break up a document into smaller "topics," then combine them in different ways to make new kinds of documents. If you do a lot of copy and paste to make new documents, you can probably do it better using DITA.

Not everyone responded publicly, and instead shared their comments privately in an email. For privacy, we will share only their first name:

Tim writes project documentation:

I'm a business analyst and most of my work involves writing project documents like process flows. I also write a lot of status reports, and project updates. Most of my work is with Word 365 online, but I've used Google Docs for real-time collaboration.

Jon writes program documentation:

Test cases and programming. I don't do a lot of writing, so I use Copilot to revise what I write and make it better.

Celebrate writing

Everyone does some form of technical or professional writing, no matter what their job title at work. Project managers write status reports and project plans, supervisors write performance appraisals, HR writes job postings, managers write business plans, consultants write recommendation reports, executives write strategic plans. The list goes on! It doesn't matter what your "regular" job is, everyone needs to write well.

And there is no one favorite tool for writing—what you use depends on the office environment as well as personal preference. If you write on the "desktop," then you might use Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or Google Docs If you write documentation that's intended for an online audience, you might use a web content management system like Drupal or WordPress, or maybe a plain text editor like Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code or Vim to write in a markup system like HTML, Markdown, or Asciidoc. Still others might use an XML-based markup like Docbook or DITA. Scientific and engineering authors might also use other markup systems like groff or LaTeX.

On October 20, the National Day on Writing, we want to celebrate writing in all its forms, and highlight the many tools that you can use for writing. Explore the many articles we have shared on Technically We Write to get started with a new tool or learn a new skill. Here are a few articles we recommend:

Microsoft Word: Book content · Structured writing · Accessible documents · Images · Paragraph spacing · Styles

LibreOffice Writer: Command line conversion · User interface options · Accessibility · ODT file · Format workbooks · Templates · Keyboard shortcuts

Drupal: Adding maps · Roles and permissions · FAQ pages · Using AI · Menus · Lazy loading images · Live chat · Redirects · Scheduling content

DITA: Topic based authoring · DITA projects · DITA topics · DITA Concepts · DITA Tasks · DITA References · DITA Maps · DITA Open Toolkit

Groff: Formatting a book · References · Groff -ms · Change fonts · Groff -me · Groff -mom · Writing books · Code samples · Tables

A look back: As-Easy-As · Early word processing · Printing in the 1980s · DOS edlin · Unix ed · MacWrite · Dot matrix printers · Early word processors · TeleType 33 · Galaxy Write · WordPerfect · Word for DOS · WordStar