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I Am Not a Technical Writer

I normally don't like to write such posts about myself but sometimes I need to write them to get an audience to listen to me and sometimes (like this) I need to describe something about myself to make it clear.

This time I have to describe a few points about myself to let others know them and somehow help some people and my mailbox.

Many of you (whether you're a regular subscriber and reader or a random visitor) know me from things that I've written like my books, articles, reviews or blog posts.

Since June 2005 I've been active on the .NET community with English stuff and before then (since 2003) I was active on Persian .NET community as well. I think that in the past three years I wrote over 40 English articles and tutorials, authored a book, co-authored another book, and guest-authored and tech-edited a third book. I also wrote almost 800 blog posts in this while.

I had (and have) some main reasons to write and these are the reasons that attract me to write even though I'm a busy person who would prefer to stay away from writing.

• I love reading and writing: This is a passion like a love to soccer or Rock music or something else. When you love something, it can get your mind!
• I have a serious passion for sharing the knowledge and communicating with others: It's not limited to software development because I've had some Persian articles and translations about applied mathematics or networking as well. In my opinion everyone should try to share his or her knowledge with the rest of the world and of course, everyone who does this, will see its direct effect on his or her technical and personal life.
• I love to train my English language: You may know that I'm not a native English speaker but I love this language so writing (and reading) is a good way to train my skills. My earliest subscribers can notice the big change in my skills in the past three years as much as I trained my language. Of course, this reason is not as bold as the past. As more as I learn English, I have to choose new ways to train my language.

Writing, by nature, doesn't have much income like my main job which is software development so I never think about writing as a business. Moreover, technical writing needs some skills that I never had. I've had some studies about publication and writing but I have no doubt that there is a long way for me to be a technical writer.

The problem that caused me to write this post is the increasing number of requests that I receive for such writing experiences. Some publishers ask for authoring a book or tech-editing, some communities ask for article or tutorials and some companies ask for reviews of their products. This process is duplicated recently after publishing my book with Wrox and some popular articles here and there.

Such requests are making me mad. Personally it's hard for me to disappoint others and say "No". I also dislike to not answer emails that directly target me. So I decided to publish this post and make things clear.

Unfortunately sometimes others have some wrong anticipations about you that you're not really like that. I usually don't care about this and don't try to change others minds because my activities and the progress of time change things. One of these wrong anticipations (for 2-3 years ago) was about the fact that some people thought I'm a Community Server developer and there were lots of offers around it but during the time everyone understood that I'm just a Community Server fan who has been thinking about it just as an interest and case study to learn new things and may know much about it.

So what about this technical writing thing? For two reasons I'd like to ask you to not send me emails for technical writing experiences. In writing, I usually try to choose my topics and formats. I write what I feel it's good to write about because it's just based on my own passion and love. Of course, I've accepted a few of these requests that I liked them but the main reason was they could attract me. Those who have worked with me for paid writing works, know that I'm very flexible about money side of things. Generally I don't consider money when I like a project because I always have tried to love my job and don't try to make things hard for myself.

The second reason is the fact that I'm not a technical writer to be able to write about many of the topics that others ask from me. You may like my writings (as feedbacks have been excellent) but they're good because in my opinion I've had a deep understanding of the topic that could help me describe things easily and also because I always try to keep things simple and this simplicity helps a writing so much. Why I don't write about PowerShell? Just because I don't have a deep understanding of it. I know it in general but this understanding is not enough to write something about it.

By the way, I'm going to reduce my writing ratio for a while because there are some things going on to make me busy.

Steven Smith and Sonu Kapoor are my dear friends at ASP Alliance and DotNetSlackers so I do write for them on a regular basis just for my own passion and if I can find its time. Last year I didn't write any article for almost 10 months just because I was busy!

I'm also a big fan of Wrox and try to write for them if I find something interesting and helpful and a free schedule for it. I also write this blog that is just a blog regardless of its content type and audience. Others have similar blogs with same content and this doesn't seem to be a logical reason to be a good technical writer. There were only a few cases where some teams inside Microsoft asked me to help them with writing experiences to build a community around a new technology and I helped them regarding my time and effort.

If you attend to my writing activities, you would believe that I never wanted to become a writer! I never wanted and never allowed writing to make me busy and put me away from development that is my main job. It's not bad to have a second experience to be able to make money from it (as my university degree is also in mathematics) but thankfully I haven't found any necessity for my alternative experiences yet!

2 Comments : 05.02.08

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