Leveraging AI Prompts for Technical Writing

What Are AI Prompts?

AI Prompts are statements given to the ChatGPT-like system in the form of questions or instructions that help users generate answers/content on specific topics faster. From helping users write product descriptions to simplifying steps in writing user manuals for product documentation, AI prompts can help you do it all in seconds.

Importance of AI Prompts in Technical Writing

Given how AI Prompts work for writers in general, technical writers can gain many benefits from its regular use. Some of these include the following.

1. Streamlines content creation for technical writers

With the ability to generate quick answers, it enables technical writers to produce their content in a streamlined manner. They can easily generate content for various sections separately or give a detailed prompt around various sections of the piece and generate a complete piece that helps them include the necessary terms for the technical article.

2. Ensures consistent styling

You can add inputs when writing AI prompts around content styling, like headlines, and marking the keywords using either bold or italics. This helps you maintain consistent uniformity throughout the piece and ensure it matches your technical writing guidelines.

3. Improves readability and user engagement

If written correctly, AI prompts for technical writing can help improve the readability of an article and enhance user engagement. They can suggest simpler terms to help people with a non-technical background understand technical terms better and keep them engaged with the article for a long time.

4. Automate tasks

From formatting to citation, AI prompts can help you do it all. Technical writers will find AI useful as it automates tasks such as these and helps them focus on the major chunk of technical writing without losing time on repetitive tasks.

5. Facilitates semantic enrichment of content

With AI technical writing prompts, you can also generate relevant metadata, tags, or cross-references that enhance the searchability and interconnectedness of technical documents. This way, you can ensure that it becomes more search-friendly and increase the readership of these articles.

6. Reshape technical writing workflow

Understand that if you write your AI prompts correctly, you get the right content suggestions and even catch errors in technical knowledge faster. What’s more, if you add your existing content in AI and ask it to offer feedback, it would help you identify areas where it can be improved based on technical information and even grammar.

AI Prompts for Technical Writing

Given how beneficial AI prompts turn out to be in technical writing, it is hard not to use them and simplify your work in the future. However, their application varies depending on the type of technical documentation you plan to write for your business.

Document360’s AI suite has many AI features among which AI search and Eddy assistance are popular among technical writers, for creating templates and accelerating content creation.

Considering this, we’ve compiled a few use cases of AI prompts in technical writing to help you understand how they can be used.

1. Create user manuals

If you plan to create a user manual for your product, you want to ensure that users understand how it works. You can use a step-by-step approach to writing your manuals and ensure that users find them easy to follow. After all, it will help you strengthen your product adoption rate with existing users.

Here’s the kind of prompt you can write.

Prompt: Create a user manual for editing existing documentation. It must cover sections like “How to edit an article?” “Open in Portal,” and “Viewing the Markdown of a published article.” Add a small introduction of no more than 30 words and include steps for each section. The tone should be neutral, considering users like writers, editors, and product managers.

This is how you may receive your first initial draft using Document360’s Eddy assistance:

2. Generate API documentation

We know that APIs help software applications communicate and exchange data with one another. So, if you plan to write API documentation for your software application, you can use the following prompt to generate its content faster.

Prompt: Write an API documentation on REST APIs that includes code examples. Use clear language and simplify technical terms for layman’s understanding. Illustrate the concept of REST APIs in detail and add examples to help readers how to integrate them into existing software applications.

Here’s what you will see:

Also read: How GenAI can improve API documentation?

3. Translate and rewrite content

There is a lot of technical content that is written in different languages. But that shouldn’t stop people from accessing it. Just in case your documentation tool doesn’t offer multilingual support, you can add the existing content in the AI tool to translate and ask it to be rewritten as well. Here’s the prompt you can use:

Prompt: Translate the following content into English. Rewrite certain technical terms to help laymen understand them better. Use a neutral tone to target the general audience.

4. Prompts for UX writing

UX writing is another technical writing process that allows you to help users better understand the interface of a product. Here’s a quick prompt to help you generate UX content.

Prompt: Create a quick tutorial to help users understand how to use the mobile application. Explore the best practices they can adopt while exploring and using the application along with tooltips, product walkthrough, and contextual help. Use a personal tone to explain the step-by-step process for non-technical users.

5. Enhance content with AI-suggested content improvements

Technical documentation content can be improved using AI tools. A few documentation tools also offer AI capabilities that help you perform the same functionality. Tools like Document360 offer AI capabilities like AI writing that help you:

• Make content longer
• Make content shorter
• Create outlines
• Change article tone
• Convert speech into text
• Split sentence

But in case you are not using powerful documentation tools such as these, here’s a prompt you can use to enhance your content.

Prompt: Add three new sections to the existing draft to increase the word count and change the article tone to instructional and generic to help them understand technical terms better.

6. Write proposals

Writing technical proposals can be challenging because one needs to cover how to deliver a product, service, or project to their clients. To write one successfully, you can try the following proposal writing prompt.

Prompt: Create a detailed proposal around our product and how it will solve users’ problems. Clearly explain the approach we plan to take while creating the product, the coding language we plan to use, and how running the tool on that coding language can help us reduce extra work during product upgrades. Cover the benefits of the product, its use cases, and possible competitors in the market.

Here‘s what you will see as the initial draft using Document360’s Eddy assistance:

7. Create a detailed technical whitepaper

Technical whitepapers are long-form content pieces that help you bring together common industry problems and how a product or service can solve them. Therefore, writing this type of technical content can be time-consuming. However, if you try the following prompt, you can reduce the time you spend creating one from scratch.

Prompt: Write a draft for a technical whitepaper on “_______________” and explore the potential risks and challenges that industry leaders are likely to face in its absence. Explore mitigation strategies for the same challenges and how they can be implemented with the right set of tools including our own. Conclude the paper with the next steps of action and a value proposition that users can take away from the whitepaper.

8. Develop prompts for SME communication

Technical subject matter experts (SMEs) must relay a lot of technical information to laymen and help them understand various concepts in articulate yet easy-to-understand language. That’s one reason they must communicate well with people and resolve upcoming doubts.

Here’s a prompt to help them work on this:

Prompt: Suggest a list of follow-up questions, possibly open-ended, to encourage detailed discussion on “____________” and communicate a few techniques for the same in layman’s terms to help people with non-technical backgrounds understand the concepts better.

Also Read: Top 7 AI Tools for Technical Writing