1. I'd Rather Be Writing
2. AI
3. Skills

Skills

Consider this idea: A company has 100 tech-writer-specific skills that are highly adopted and used across the organization. This collection of skills, focusing on internal authoring skills, has skills for doing virtually anything related to tech writing that you can imagine — fixing a bug, applying a style edit, checking release notes for accuracy, fixing comments in proto styles, and more. The skills don’t do the job entirely themselves but rather act as power tools for the writers, accelerating and amplifying their work.

Not everyone uses all 100 of the tech writer skills. Instead, each tech writer adds the skills most relevant to their tasks in a skills.json file. Some have even created virtual agents that have these skills.

Is this 100 TW skills idea worthwhile? The merits of the 100 skills idea is questionable; there are many problems associated with it. And yet, I think the idea could be interesting. We would essentially be externalizing the skills of an entire profession in a way that could be used cross-organizationally, by any role. This is unsettling as it may lead to our irrelevance. But there’s also a high possibility of amplification: by externalizing our skills, we build upon each others’ strengths. Is it possible to construct skills in such a way that other writers, particularly those who didn’t make the skills, find them useful?

In this series, I’ll build out these ideas into a course on skills.