Image courtesy of Nick Morrison on Unsplash

We’re a few weeks into 2024 and now that we’re past the “best of” lists and the “year in review” lists, there’s a bit of time to take a look at what we might find most productive in the coming quarters. I always enjoy taking a few deep breaths once the frenzy of the year-start fades to look at what I might find truly useful as the daffodils peek their heads up in the park and I begin to feel the true momentum of the year take shape. I kick off the winter blues and roll my sleeves up to dig in.

This year, my company is more sure than ever that we will harness the ever-growing powers of AI as it enters a more mature phase, and I for one am grateful for the embracing of that stance. Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is no longer just a buzzword. Companies are beginning to sift through the hype to discover what is really providing value and what was just marketing hubris. I’m glad of it. I suppose I am glad because I work for a company that knows the difference and tends to put their weight behind it. Sure, we have some applications that are neither artificial nor intelligent, but we own up to the ones that are data and machine learning, and we boast about the ones that have weight to throw around. And that is fun and ambitious.

So I enjoy rolling up my sleeves to explore the ways that Generative AI might improve my work, and I enjoy tossing out the ways that it is a big, fat dud. So let’s look at the four ways I think it might actually improve what I do.

Drafting

First drafts are the things that take up the bulk of any writer’s time, whether tech writer or fiction writer. We know what it is that we want to say, we just aren’t sure how to get started. It’s not writer’s block per se, it’s just the words in our brains don’t spill out on to the page as quickly as we’d like or as smoothly as they should. Our years of training are well suited to editing and refining, which we are likely to have already begun in our heads. It’s the typing that can be painful because it simply isn’t as fast as our thought processes.

But a Generative AI tool is as fast. Faster, even. If we can spin up a good prompt, we can get some of the process started, and that is often enough to grease the wheels and we can take it from there.

Most likely the way we will be able to effectively harness what Gen AI really has to offer is to become adept at crafting and refining the prompts to get us started. I began writing chapters of my book recently by asking ChatGPT to help me organize the table of contents, then I asked it to revise that TOC because it wasn’t quite the way I liked it. The actual TOC looks nothing like it did when good ol’ AI first started it, but what was nice is that it gave me liftoff. I knew in my head what I wanted to do, but the way my creative brain was working was to think of the book as the whole, not its parts. That is awful for a writer. As the saying goes, “you can’t boil the ocean.” Indeed you can’t. And while AI wrote not a single word of this post, that’s because I have been able to think of its component parts. With my book, I was thinking of the whole thing, start to finish, and I needed a hand in visualizing what the chapters might look like. By asking AI to help me out with that, I was able to think of the pieces rather than the whole. It was only then that I could sit down and begin to write.

With that in mind, we as creators will be able to ask Gen AI not to write for us, but to draft for us, so that we can get out of the muck that is stuck in our brains and begin to refine and edit and revise after the foundation is laid. What is left behind as detritus will be much like what we left behind us when we were drafting ourselves – an unrecognizable skeleton of tossed aside word salads. It requires our fine touch to render the work useful and beautiful. Gen AI will have helped us get there faster, much the same way moving from horse to car allowed us to move from place to place more quickly, too.

Automating Q&A

As a tech writer, I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I have been asked to write an FAQ section for documentation.

My answer to this request is always the same. I will not.

I will not write an FAQ because if there are frequently asked questions, I should answer those within the documentation. Sheesh!

And yet.

There remain some questions that indeed, users will face time and again that are unlikely to be answered in the documentation. I get it. No matter how much of a purist I am, I understand that there are frequently asked questions that need frequent answers.

So a technical writer can collate those questions and help develop the chatbot that integrates with a product’s or company’s knowledge repository to answer those repetitive questions effectively. This bot can instantly provide responses in a way that no live writer could, through a call-and-response mechanism that is smoother than static documentation. By leveraging AI, we can ask our tools to ingest data and interpret our users’ needs and provide output that is both relevant and accurate. This can enhance the user’s experience by responding immediately whereas a human might require time to look something up, or might be off-hours or otherwise detained.

AI-powered chatbots are efficient, interactive, and fast. But they serve only after technical writers feed them all they need in terms of information. It’s vital to remember that our AI tools are only as good as the data they are given to start with.

Data

Technical writers will also be very well served by the data that AI can give us. Back when I was in graduate school, we worked very hard to manually enter volumes of information to build dictionaries of strings of phrases and what they meant in general syntax. It was difficult and time consuming. Today, though, thanks to AI-powered tools, we could have completed that project in a fraction of the time.

How AI data will benefit tech writers is that it will allow us to gather truly valuable insights into our users’ behaviors and we can stop making what we once knew were educated guesses about their pathways. Tools we have now measure user engagement, search pattern behaviors, and even the effectiveness of our content through click rates, bounce patterns, andmore, and they serve it all up in nice, tidy numbers. We can use this to optimize our content and identify the gaps we see and close them quickly.

Leveraging analytics data allows tech writers now to focus on the content our users access often, the content that interests them the most, and the keywords they search – and do or do not find – with greatest success. Plus, we can now see just what stymies our users and all of this will empower us to create the most targeted content that will greatly improve the user experience.

Optimization

More than just a buzzword, content optimization is probably the most powerful benefit of AI-enabled tech writing. Asking a good AI tool to analyze technical documentation to provide feedback about readability against a style guide and structural rules is probably the best thing we could ask for. Sure, we’ve got things like grammarly and acrolinx to do spot-checking. That’s all well and good. But now AI can help us enhance accessibility, it can help us tailor content for specific audiences, it can allow or disallow entire phrases and terms. We can advance our proofreading capabilities far more than we could before by loading in custom dictionaries and guides.

Tools like grammarly are basic, but with advancing NLP processing tools, the arsenal we have just grows. We can pass our work through a domain-specific tool that offers a profession-specific set of guidelines and lets us examine with a microscope things like acronyms, codes, and more.

The time savings there is not perfect, of course. We’ll still need to copyedit. But imagine, if you will, that every first or second pass of all of our text now is done in mere seconds. All typos are caught by AI so that we can clean up and polish with an editor’s eye not just a proofreader’s.

Sit back with a cup of coffee and really read, not just grab a pencil and mark up a piece of paper the way we used to.

My, that’s nice.