I have been writing manuals for all kinds of things for many (many) years. I have found that over the years I have become more comfortable writing manuals and honed my writing skills for the audience. I’ve written operations manuals, instruction manuals, training manuals, national contracts, and even franchise disclosure documents (which is probably the one I like the least). After writing manuals for so long, I have developed my own list of tips on how to write a manual.

1. Create a list: write down all the topics that you should / want to include in your manual. They don’t have to be in any particular order yet. Simply understanding the topics can help with the thinking process. If you think of something on a specific topic at random, you can open your document and jot down your ideas for further expansion.
2. Always have a pencil and paper handy – you will have random thoughts and ideas as you work on other tasks in your daily work. If you write them right then you can include them in your manual later.
3. Consult with other people in your company; in most cases, you won’t know everything you have to know about a specific topic or procedure. Instead of struggling to come up with something that sounds good, talk to the expert about it … and take really good notes for later manual translation.
4. Don’t Redo Work That Has Been Done – If you include sections in your manual that have already been written on that topic, find those documents or pieces and start there. For example, I like to include an introduction about the company (that is, who the company is, its mission and values, etc.). Most companies include this information on their company website. You may have to rephrase some things, add or even remove some things from the existing material, but this is much easier than having to start from scratch.
5. Get everything written and soon format the document: there is no point in formatting and putting everything in the correct order until everything is written. If you start formatting before you finish typing, you may find that you are spending more time formatting than typing.
6. Write in the third person and whose use specific names, using me, you, us, etc. in manuals it can get quite confusing (and it really seems unprofessional). Continuing to use the company name and employee titles is also safer. If you include employee names, you may find yourself updating the manual every time someone leaves or joins the company. This is not only time consuming, it is also unnecessary. Using titles just simplifies your life and makes the document much easier to manage (especially if it is on the hundreds of pages like mine).
7. Forever Ask someone else to review the document, either all at once or in sections. You wrote the document, so when you try to correct it, you will probably miss at least some errors. Having someone else do the proofreading for you will allow a fresh set of eyes to scan the document and find things you may have missed.
8. Find a co-writer, if you can. If this is your ‘baby’ then you will be writing alone, but if you can find a co-writer and split the tracks, it will probably be completed in half the time. A word of caution though, they both might have very different writing styles, so the document might not flow very well. Finding someone with a similar writing style, or finding someone who can edit to make it sound like it was written by the same person, can help with the flow of the document.