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Skills and Traits of Freelance Technical Writers
Thetechnical writing job is one of your choices as a freelancer. In the freelance mode, you do not need to worry about skills which you do not have. you can learn them. Ability to do something does not always mean that you must be with it or that you need to have grown around them in your life. To be successful in freelance technical writing, you just need to develop some important skills.
The skills which successful freelancers in thetechnical writing job should have include tax management, service marketing, administrative work, downtime productivity and basic computer literacy. As a freelancer, you need to know how to compute your taxes and find ways to save or avoid, not evade, taxes which you may. You also need to know how to market your services. Further, the ability to handle administrative work is important. You must know how to follow up with leads, track queries and paperwork like your writing your resume, contracts and invoices in your freelance enterprise. Another essential skill is making productive use of downtime. Lastly, your basic computing skills should be present.
The personality traits which freelancer doing thetechnical writing job should have include passion, organisatin, independence, persistence and assuredness. For any of these which you do not have or poor in, you can work around and develop. Passion or love for what you are doing is first. This first trait even comes to points in which you still have it even when you hate what you are doing. Knowing how to prioritise is what organisation is about. You must set a schedule and stick to it. Highly related to this is independence which means that you are comfortable and effective working alone and have the initiative. Then, you should follow up with persistence and assuredness in doing your writer job.
In research, we often need to combine technical writing with other styles within a single article or book. Scientists can learn a lot from good technical writing, but we can also fail as scientists, or not reach our potential, if we think that science communication is the same thing as technical communication.