Saturday 1 November 2014

Guidelines For Oil And Gas Technical Writer And Editor

By Etta Bowen


The responsibility of writers for technical documents is really important. They are the ones making the manuals or guides for products, design specifications, project plans, white papers, test plans, and business correspondence. This is not just an individual effort, but within a writing team where it consists of many authors in order to deliver one voice in the document.

Companies are hiring these kinds of writers for their products and services. For example, an oil and gas technical writer and editor are quite different from other writings for products that are in the market right now. This is because of their unique type of business where the marketing strategy has a different way to attract consumers.

The type of industry for this one is sort of a niche of huge sums of money but with only little number of people related to it. Their procedures are highly complex as well, so this means that the writers need to convincingly make the documents. They have to have enough knowledge on their resources, their explorations, refineries, downstreams, and every detail that can get.

The pace for this kind of industry is really fast, this means that they should be able to catch up with the changes over time in order to provide accurate documents. For example, for a long stretch of twelve months, the changes in prices for barrels has developed stable relationships which made new opportunities. Tracing down those trends would make it a crucial responsibility for them.

Because of the challenges and the fast paced trends and changes that occur in the company of their client, they need to built a strong relationship with them. This would be their determining factor for their success of the team of writers. Also, the client has an advantage with this since they no longer need to conduct training for them like in some other teams.

The techniques that these oil and gas tech writers have already piled up and they know a lot based on these experiences. These knowledge is closely related to the company they work for. And they are also very generous in sharing their techniques and ideas.

The flow of details would tend to go really smooth because of the bond that is built with these clients. The knowledge and information that can be taken from them would be easily acquired from analysts and subject matter experts. All of this should be known prior to the start of the documentation.

There should be enough respect for the information that the clients are giving to them. This is already common sense in the legal aspect for disclosures of privacy. The writers are dealing with documents that if leaked, could cost billions from the damages occurred.

The writing style may be different as per request by the client, but having a notion of making the style in the point of view of the reader generally works well. Also, they should never stop their learning process. Since this is a constantly changing market, new information and knowledge would be released and therefore edits and new documentations would be needed as well. Always do researches and regularly consult the analysts or the experts.




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