Most technical writers are only English or journalism majors who took 2 college classes in science and now call themselves "technical communicators".

When you've got a highly technical project near a major deadline, especially an R&D effort that might be patentable, English majors just don't cut the mustard. You need a highly technical writer, a licensed Professional Engineer who quickly learns your complex technology, writes for your highly technical audience, and gets done on time and on budget. (Because you forgot about documentation until the last second, right? Don't worry; it's our little secret.)

With Avery Enterprises, you get both a better quality of manual and an extra temp engineer to note and fix lingering problems. In fact, much of our technical writing work overlaps into test engineering.

We quickly learn your software packages to get your job done. One past project involved a book on Visual Basic and 2 days to cram it into our heads. After that, we got the software package and wrote a user manual for the client's GUI. We included all the ways we found to crash the software (to tell users, "Don't do this!") The client had no idea how un-robust their software was -- until they read our manual. Then they were really happy they'd hired us--and kept us on for another week to test their software fixes.

Because we work directly with customers (without a temp agency as go-between), our rates are comparable with temp agencies--but your results will be an order of magnitude better than a temp agency can provide. Our 15 years in technical writing for software and electronics includes:

• Software documentation (and occasionally debugging!)
• Calibration manuals and test procedures for checking the accuracy and function of electronic equipment
• Operator manuals/user guides to show all highly technical functions of a system/software package
• Technical disclosures of R&D material to aid in obtaining a patent
• Editing at all levels of the editing process, from copy editing (grammar, spelling, etc.) to checking for technical accuracy
• Quick learning of essential software to get your job done

We use Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) and Adobe (Framemaker, Pagemaker, Illustrator, etc.), as well as Visio, Quark XPress and HTML. But if you have a software package we need to learn, bring it on! Our patent work is, by definition, cutting-edge, so we deal with new stuff literally all the time.

Here's a sample technical document to look at.

We have our own office with cable Internet (if your office space is full). But we can also come onsite and even bring our own laptop (to avoid your internal IT morass). Either way, we work quickly and quietly (and, honestly, isn't your office crazy enough already?)

We even help business owners with their business plans. If you've got a great idea (for either a new business or an expansion of an old one), but no one will invest with you until they see your coherent written business plan, we'll fix your current business plan (or write a new one for you) in just a few hours so you can start making money!