Express Writers
Should You Hire a Tech Writer or Do It Yourself?

Should You Hire a Tech Writer or Do It Yourself?

by | Nov 5, 2024 | Content Marketing, Copywriting

Businesses need to deliver high-quality content that not only informs but also enhances the user experience. Crafting that content can be a challenge. This is where hiring a technical writer can make a significant difference. A technical writer can ensure clear, precise communication and reduce errors. By improving accuracy, a technical writer can enhance the overall user experience, support business goals, and avoid costly mistakes — all while ensuring your content maintains a professional, authoritative tone.

Continue reading to learn more reasons why you should hire a technical writer for your business.

Reasons to Hire a Professional Tech Writer Rather than Doing It Yourself

Here are seven reasons why it’s typically a better business choice to hire a professional tech writer for content creation, rather than just winging it with free or in-house resources.

1.Expertise in Communication

As with many professional fields, excellence in writing comes from hundreds to thousands of hours of practice, refined by constant feedback. Experienced professional technical writers excel at transforming complex technical information into clear, user-friendly content.

2. Cost Efficiency

Outsourcing technical writing allows businesses to pay for professionally written content as they need. Going with in-house staff requires committing to fixed expenses associated with hiring, training, and providing benefits to full-time writers.

3. Time Optimization

When you entrust documentation tasks to experts, your people can concentrate on their core responsibilities. This way you’ll get both products and written content to market faster.

4. Enhanced User Experience

For potentially complex products like software or machinery, high-quality technical documentation will typically obviate a lot of avoidable user frustration by providing users with clear instructions on appropriate technical difficulty.

5. Access to Specialized Knowledge

Hiring technical writing services gives you access to expertise across various industries. For example, if your business manufactures automotive electronics and plans to market to aviation installers as well, you’ll either need to find and acquire an already experienced and credentialed aviation professional to navigate the more complex regulations or you can simply contract with an agency that has the professional expertise you need, with availability for as much or as little work as you require.

6. Reduction in Errors

Professional technical writers are adept at creating accurate and consistent documentation, minimizing the risk of errors that can arise from miscommunication or lack of expertise. Depending on what your business sells, fewer errors will help you avoid either minor inconveniences or potentially disastrous liabilities.

7. Mitigation of Technical Debt

Growth of U.S. voice assistants.

Image from: TechTarget

Comprehensive and up-to-date documentation reduces technical debt — the accumulation of additional work due to shortcuts or rushed decisions. If you assign an engineer or some other kind of technical specialist an overwhelming amount of writing responsibilities — perhaps involving complex document assembly or content written at different levels of technical competence — you’ll likely have to pay considerably more to remedy the situation after the fact. 

Some Less Obvious Reasons to Hire a Real, Breathing Technical Writer

The reasons listed above are — for the most part — reasons to outsource just about anything your business doesn’t actually specialize in doing. Over the last few decades, successive waves of new technologies — the internet, collaboration apps like Zoom and Slack, and cloud services in particular — have made it possible for businesses, small and large, to outsource pretty much everything from marketing and sales to human resource management and payroll services. In fields like IT, outsourcing has effectively become standard practice, with 92% of G2000 companies relying on outside IT services.

In short, the modern world allows you to find whatever expertise you lack and pay for only as much of it as you want. And this line of reasoning applies to technical writing as much as any other kind of specialized expertise.

The Role AI Plays in Technical Writing Options

What are the less obvious reasons to hire professional writing services — reasons that don’t equally apply to other potentially outsourced tasks?

If I were writing this blog any more than three years ago, the phrase “doing it yourself” in this context would have rather unequivocally meant something like “assigning writing responsibilities to some technically knowledgeable employee and hoping for the best.” However, in any conversation going on today, “doing it yourself” almost certainly means outsourcing written content to generative AI. 

AI tools like ChatGPT can crank out pages of readable, fairly accurate technical content in minutes rather than hours — and all without typos, misspellings, and the odd conflation of “then” and “than.” 

Why not save some money and go with free and passable AI-generated content?

Successfully teaching machines to process and generate human language is an amazing breakthrough in the history of human technology, rivaling — for sheer complexity and required ingenuity — achievements like human flight or splitting the atom. But on its own, it doesn’t tell us anything about how people feel about reading AI-generated content versus good old-fashioned human-written content.

Data Behind the Benefits of a Human Tech Writer

Studies suggest that while most people probably aren’t as good at distinguishing human-written content from generative AI outputs as they think they are, they nevertheless have some strong, value-based opinions on the subject. 

Let’s look at the findings of some recent studies — and please pardon the three-foot titles preferred in academia:

​On the whole, what these and other studies indicate is that when readers identify AI-generated content in a technical context, their estimation of the authority and credibility of the text goes down. As a reader’s ability to make this distinction scales with understanding the subject matter, AI-generated technical content is likely to be most off-putting to exactly the audience it targets.

Capture Your Audience’s Attention with Human Content

These developments are all still quite new and only partially understood. This apparent preference for human-generated insights may turn out to represent a real distinction in value. Or it may be simply a kind of nostalgia akin to our habit of placing a higher value on handmade things once machines start to make them. For business purposes, however, it doesn’t really matter.

For now, most people — and by extension, most of your potential customers — identify expertise as a still uniquely human quality. If you want to capture their attention and gain their trust, you’ll need to speak to them with an identifiably human voice.

If you’re convinced, try one of ours.