20 ms·

Notes on Technical Writing

414 points by marcuskaz 7y ago

criddell 7y ago
The third section advises to avoid meta writing. So... get rid of the first two paragraphs of this article?
- leksak 7y ago
  Avoid meta writing when doing technical writing, not when writing about technical writing. It's already meta.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  But this is a non-technical piece of writing about technical writing, not a piece of technical writing :)
- suyash 7y ago
  It's not black or white like the author is suggesting, you need to give context in most cases which means a good introduction before jumping into the meat of the matter.
kaycebasques 7y ago
When I first saw the title I thought to myself, “shit, another random, possibly misleading post about technical writing?” but on quick review this seems to be a well-researched overview of the field. If you were to ask a practicing technical writer to present a summary like this, it wouldn’t differ much. If the author is here, I’m curious if they took that definition of technical writing from my post? [1] To the best of my memory I feel like I came up with that definition on my own but also wouldn’t be surprised if I subconsciously took it from somewhere else. [1] https://kayce.basqu.es/blog/metrics/ https://kayce.basqu.es/blog/metrics/
- voidhorse 7y ago
  Agreed! This was quite refreshing. There's some great advice in this piece. An aside: did you redesign your website, Kayce? I recall it looking quite different in the past. It looks great! I like the aesthetic.
- marcuskaz 7y ago
  I am here, and I have read several of your posts, thanks for wonderful resource. So yes, it is quite possible I took the definition from you, I collected the various notes over time, so I'm not always positive where they come from.
- leetrout 7y ago
  Per Google & DDG y'all are the only two, exactly the same, wordings so I'd say they snipped it from you previously, Kayce :)
kwiens 7y ago
This is well done! > Support error recognition and recovery. I totally agree with this. You have to teach critical concepts a couple different ways in case one gets skimmed over or misunderstood. We rely on visuals for this--the text should stand independent of the photo / diagram, and vice versa. I wrote a handbook on technical writing summing up what we've learned over many years of writing iFixit repair guides. https://help.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing/chapter/0 https://help.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing/chapter/0
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  Another hugely important reason to support error recovery: this is how many people find documentation. They see an error when using an application (or writing code) and they copy-paste the error into a search engine. If you provide that error text verbatim in your documentation, you will capture that search engine traffic.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
These are great notes! I’ve been writing for years, but I am constantly finding out that I still have a long way to go. Thanks!
- D-Coder 7y ago
  I recommend _Technical Editing: The Practical Guide For Editors And Writers_, https://www.amazon.com/Technical-Editing-Practical-Editors-Hewlett-Packard/dp/0201563568 https://www.amazon.com/Technical-Editing-Practical-Editors-H...
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    Thanks! I'll give it a look-see.
BossingAround 7y ago
A lot of technical writers focus on the style of the text. For example, I've seen tech writers have long discussions (more than 3 hour-long meetings) about title capitalization in our organization. I wish tech writers would channel their focus elsewhere: - If you haven't got it working, don't document it. Getting information by talking to SWEs is not enough. Your docs will lack depth and preciseness, and it will show. A lot. - Show fully qualified imports in code samples. If you don't know what that is, ask SWEs. Given a computer with installed dependencies (such as Maven, Pip, npm, etc.), even your (grand)mother should be able to follow the docs. - Create automated testsuide for your code samples. - Mandate that lack of docs be a blocker for a release. When there are docs written in perfect style and English, yet none of the code samples works, or when I have to spend 30 minutes finishing the "obvious" parts of the code to get it to work, that's when I get really frustrated. The article seems to be deeply focused on the style. I can't remember when I got frustrated with documentation because the style was bad, or because the sentences were too long.
- voidhorse 7y ago
  A fair observation. I do think there's some value to concerns over style, but far too many tech writers give them undue prominence. I couldn't champion your bulleted points harder. Honestly, if I had a say in it, any tech writer working on developer documentation should be able to code/build/perform/use whatever task or api they're documenting without the help of an engineer. They should be able to read and understand code, and they should be willing to do so, even more so than the average engineer using some library code. They should be capable of understanding a library deeply and synthesizing and summarizing that understanding for users of the library. Just as tech writers in the medical field need to know quite a bit about medicine, tech writers in software should be required to know quite a bit about engineering software. There's plenty that do, but there's also quite a few that don't--I think it's a side effect of the field's relative youth. I really wish more writers would code and do exactly the things you mention, such as implement robust code sample testing, etc. The ideal technical writer, at least for software engineering documentation, is a hybrid of a traditional technical writer and a software engineer[^1]. [^1]: This excludes user-facing software documentation, which is essentially a totally different field than those that deal with writing for developer or engineer audiences.
timogoosen101 7y ago
Anyone know where I can get legit technical writing gigs? I used to get paid to write about Elasticsearch for a company's blog and that was pretty cool. Would be keen to do something like that again. I can write about anything in the sysadmin/devops space or in the penetration testing space. Thanks
- BossingAround 7y ago
  Apply to a large company. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, all of these and many more have tech writers as a full time position. Of course, there are not gigs. I know nothing of gigs to be honest.
  - timogoosen101 7y ago
    Thanks, but I don't know if I'd wanna do this full time.
- justboxing 7y ago
  Hey Tim, Upwork. Create a profile as a technical writer, and put links to your docs. I've picked up partime gigs for API documentation, product usage documentation / User Guide, with screenshots and gifs on that platform. If you are US based, even better cos lot of Companies want to hire US based freelancer for TAX reasons and what not. Upwork search for client even has a filter that says "US only" and I've used that as a client also, to hire freelancers from within US. Besides traditional technical writing, there are also gigs for Technical blog posts on various subjects. Avoid the one-off gigs that are low paying, and focus on startups or companies that have already paid for other gigs (you can see it in their profile).
  - timogoosen101 7y ago
    Thanks this is a good idea will give it a shot. I am not US based I'm based in South Africa. Do you enjoy writing documentation?
aazaa 7y ago
> In this time, I’ve read various resources on technical writing and documentation. These are my notes, both to help me remember later, but also as a tool to help me think about writing now. and later, in an apparent contradiction ... > You don’t need to tell the reader what you’re going to tell them. Just tell them. I think this point could be fleshed out better. Any piece of nonfiction writing, technical or otherwise, that doesn't give me a clear idea about its content may not pass my filter. I see this the most in long-form journalism. But it also pops up when authors focus on themselves, their struggles, and their aspirations in the first couple of paragraphs. Telling the reader what they're about to read in the first paragraph of a technical piece is a courtesy. People are busy, and they don't have time to wade through a bunch of throat-clearing at the start of a piece. They'll just close the tab and move on.
- combatentropy 7y ago
  Any piece about writing will violate its own rules. I think this could be a law ;) This is because writing is hard. It is just like coding, in the sense that I can revise it three times and still find ways to make it better the fourth time, or the tenth time. So no writing is perfect, but I think I can often tell when a writer has read the right books (like On Writing Well). Every now and then an article will jump out to me as being 10 times more lucid and concise than the norm --- even though it's still imperfect. Also I think the rules are not black and white. There is some judgment needed at every turn. Sometimes you will want to bend one rule to preserve another, and people with different tastes will either praise you or blame you for how you make the call.
- voidhorse 7y ago
  This is a good counterpoint. After all, academic journals have abstracts for a reason--when people need to get something done, a synopsis quickly helps them make a decision as to whether or not they actually found the appropriate resource. It goes both ways. I think this aspect of the craft is a bit more of an art than a science. At certain points it's appropriate to signal what you're about to discuss, at others, it's just noise. In general, anything that functions similarly to an academic abstract is probably useful (saves the reader from potentially wasting time, gives an overview of the general subject matter and idea without delving into details, takes about 1 minute maximum to read).
KineticLensman 7y ago
I always try to understand the readers before writing a word. Why they are reading. And what they expect to be able to do better as a result of reading, or what decision they might be making. If an author can't answer these questions, they will likely write something that is perceived as irrelevant, wrong, or simply 'meh'. This is especially true when writing 'technical reports' as opposed to documentation.
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  "Know thy audience" and "know thy audience's purpose" are the cardinal rules of technical writing, as mentioned in Marcus's post. Often times there are limits to how much I can know about my audience. In that case it's especially helpful to put an "Assumptions" or "Intended audience" section at the top of a doc.
  - HenryBemis 7y ago
    +1 on that "thy audience", and the audience is not just the end-users. It is the 10 extra layers/people that will get to carry an opinion (and whose opinion matters) by glancing a document for 1min or less.
zelly 7y ago
Most documentation is so bad and so often out-of-date that I can answer my question faster by reading the source (or tests). Everything is so extremely verbose. I don't want to read a 7 paragraph essay about how this or that feature was developed and evolved over time; I just need a one line hint and maybe an example. Believe it or not, your software is not special. We've seen something like it before and get the gist already. I like the style of man pages, where everything is on one page and organized by the flag, i.e. actual usage (puts a hard limit on meandering bullshittery).
- toyg 7y ago
  > I like the style of man pages You are in the minority, mate. Man pages are walls of text that cover too much detail in too little space. A lot of them lack examples. Most people will take a simple task-oriented tutorial over an all-encompassing man page. That’s something that Microsoft understood very well back in the ‘90s, providing copious amounts of examples and tutorial on top of basic reference material. It’s part of the reason they saw orders of magnitude more adoption for their stack.
  - nixpulvis 7y ago
    Walls of text are great, just use / and search for what you want. Between that and command history, I think this is the best way to navigate software.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > Most documentation is so bad and so often out-of-date that I can answer my question faster by reading the source Especially within a company. Once place I worked, a few teams liked to over-document, though it wasn't enforced org-wide. The docs were usually not very helpful, outdated, and yes, I could just read the code faster. I wish they put more effort into better factored code and better names.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  Keep documentation close to the source to increase the odds it gets updated. Prefer READMEs to Wikis, and use source comments to generate docs rather than word/google docs. Some doc tools even test examples for you! It's not perfect, and good documentation is an art, but if you care about your software and your users you'll try to communicate clearly.
wilg 7y ago
I actually found this article a bit confusing to read. I suppose they are "notes" but I found myself having to reread stuff a few times and it wasn't organized in a particularly clear way. Here are some notes I had: This is a very weird sentence: > In the 1980s, they developed a minimalist approach and created a wonderful Operator Training Manual for the IBM Displaywriter, imagine having to introduce someone to using a word processor for the first time. There is also a misspelling in "the four principals of minimalist instruction". In that same section it is confusing to bullet point the four principles but include a summary of the principle at the end of the bullet point. This makes it hard to skim. (It's also self-referential, which the previous section recommends against.)
- justboxing 7y ago
  You will do really well as a proof-reader.
jszymborski 7y ago
"Don’t tell the reader something is extremely complex; likewise don’t tell the reader something is simple. The reader will make up their own mind about a concept being easy or hard." I think this is great advice, and applied to teaching. I can't tell you the number of times a professor has said "and then obviously it follows that" or "it's easy to see that". Nearly every time that was uttered in a lecture I wanted to hurl my textbook at the board. Looking for alternatives? "Is it easy?" or "It might be obvious" work fine. Maybe use those moments as opportunities to check in with your audience. In the written context, maybe offer end/footnotes explaining why it might be obvious/easy.
- abathur 7y ago
  Whenever I see this advice, or similar, I'm reminded of one of the "rules" I encountered in the style guide for an old MUD. Roughly: Don't write item/place/npc descriptions that tell the player ("you") anything they should think or feel. Easier said than done, though.
- combatentropy 7y ago
  Related: don't say someting is interesting. For example, "It's interesting that . . . " I see this preface more often than "simple" or "complex." Also there is a type of person for whom your introduction will come across as a dare to find it uninteresting.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
stygiansonic 7y ago
At the end of this article the author links to and mentions the four types of technical documentation: https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/ https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/ I’ve found this to be especially useful when writing documentation. If you don’t think in this way them your documentation may end up being an impromptu blend of more than one type, and hence may not be useful for a specific use case. Instead I try to structure the documentation for one of these.
tracer4201 7y ago
I worked on designing and implementing a data architecture at a FAANG. One of the things we found worked well was bringing documentation as close as possible to source - that way, making changes to one but not the other has a high rate of getting caught during code reviews and documentation stays in sync. The challenge with this approach was then accessibility for non technical customers who don’t care for nor have reason to look at source. Instead of building documentation pages, we leveraged a system that was a registry of datasets, individual columns, use cases, and sample queries... it was tricky to get right but we implemented a pipeline where documentation from code would get propagated to this system automagically. In terms of general technical writing, style is less of a concern I have. The real challenge is writing efficiently to convey sufficient information to the audience, without staying too high level but also not providing too many details. I often suffer from writers blockz
all_factz 7y ago
I’m a software engineer, but I have a degree in English lit. I find I love technical writing. Maybe it’s because I’m often writing about systems I built, so I understand them well and the writing comes fluidly — it might be less fun to write about systems I don’t know as well. Still, I find technical writing one of the parts of my job I most look forward to: presenting to my colleagues a proposed implementation, for example, is both a social aspect of engineering and a way to make sure your design is comprehensible and hence simple (simplicity being a hallmark of good design). I tend not to stress too much over whether I’m writing well: the goal is just to communicate ideas, after all, not to make art.
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Tech Writing is a waterfall job. What's needed is something more like peer review, where the "tech writer's" job is to ask hard question from the user POV during development - for varying values of "user", which would include customer, API consumer, and so on. This wouldn't be code review, because it's about features, interfaces, and expected behaviours, not the fine details of implementation. And it wouldn't be a PM job, because it would be peer feedback in the form of dialog, not management in the form of requirements and specs. And it should be continuous, so the doc base evolves in parallel with the code base. And it should not be an afterthought. This job does not exist yet. And it should, because virtually all orgs have a problem where individual developers become repositories of The Important Knowledge. If they leave it becomes hard to characterise system behaviours and architectures well enough to understand how they work well enough to replace/improve/reverse engineer them. So IMO there's a niche for people who are competent developers, competent listeners, and competent communicators, who can pull it all together, stay on top of changes, and leave a readable record of the current state of institutional knowledge about projects, practices, stacks, and interfaces.

414 points by marcuskaz 7y ago

criddell 7y ago

The third section advises to avoid meta writing. So... get rid of the first two paragraphs of this article?

leksak 7y ago
Avoid meta writing when doing technical writing, not when writing about technical writing. It's already meta.
cameronbrown 7y ago
But this is a non-technical piece of writing about technical writing, not a piece of technical writing :)
suyash 7y ago
It's not black or white like the author is suggesting, you need to give context in most cases which means a good introduction before jumping into the meat of the matter.

kaycebasques 7y ago

When I first saw the title I thought to myself, “shit, another random, possibly misleading post about technical writing?” but on quick review this seems to be a well-researched overview of the field. If you were to ask a practicing technical writer to present a summary like this, it wouldn’t differ much. If the author is here, I’m curious if they took that definition of technical writing from my post? [1] To the best of my memory I feel like I came up with that definition on my own but also wouldn’t be surprised if I subconsciously took it from somewhere else. [1] https://kayce.basqu.es/blog/metrics/ https://kayce.basqu.es/blog/metrics/

voidhorse 7y ago
Agreed! This was quite refreshing. There's some great advice in this piece. An aside: did you redesign your website, Kayce? I recall it looking quite different in the past. It looks great! I like the aesthetic.
marcuskaz 7y ago
I am here, and I have read several of your posts, thanks for wonderful resource. So yes, it is quite possible I took the definition from you, I collected the various notes over time, so I'm not always positive where they come from.
leetrout 7y ago
Per Google & DDG y'all are the only two, exactly the same, wordings so I'd say they snipped it from you previously, Kayce :)

kwiens 7y ago

This is well done! > Support error recognition and recovery. I totally agree with this. You have to teach critical concepts a couple different ways in case one gets skimmed over or misunderstood. We rely on visuals for this--the text should stand independent of the photo / diagram, and vice versa. I wrote a handbook on technical writing summing up what we've learned over many years of writing iFixit repair guides. https://help.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing/chapter/0 https://help.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing/chapter/0

kaycebasques 7y ago
Another hugely important reason to support error recovery: this is how many people find documentation. They see an error when using an application (or writing code) and they copy-paste the error into a search engine. If you provide that error text verbatim in your documentation, you will capture that search engine traffic.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

These are great notes! I’ve been writing for years, but I am constantly finding out that I still have a long way to go. Thanks!

D-Coder 7y ago
I recommend _Technical Editing: The Practical Guide For Editors And Writers_, https://www.amazon.com/Technical-Editing-Practical-Editors-Hewlett-Packard/dp/0201563568 https://www.amazon.com/Technical-Editing-Practical-Editors-H...
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  Thanks! I'll give it a look-see.

BossingAround 7y ago

A lot of technical writers focus on the style of the text. For example, I've seen tech writers have long discussions (more than 3 hour-long meetings) about title capitalization in our organization. I wish tech writers would channel their focus elsewhere: - If you haven't got it working, don't document it. Getting information by talking to SWEs is not enough. Your docs will lack depth and preciseness, and it will show. A lot. - Show fully qualified imports in code samples. If you don't know what that is, ask SWEs. Given a computer with installed dependencies (such as Maven, Pip, npm, etc.), even your (grand)mother should be able to follow the docs. - Create automated testsuide for your code samples. - Mandate that lack of docs be a blocker for a release. When there are docs written in perfect style and English, yet none of the code samples works, or when I have to spend 30 minutes finishing the "obvious" parts of the code to get it to work, that's when I get really frustrated. The article seems to be deeply focused on the style. I can't remember when I got frustrated with documentation because the style was bad, or because the sentences were too long.

voidhorse 7y ago
A fair observation. I do think there's some value to concerns over style, but far too many tech writers give them undue prominence. I couldn't champion your bulleted points harder. Honestly, if I had a say in it, any tech writer working on developer documentation should be able to code/build/perform/use whatever task or api they're documenting without the help of an engineer. They should be able to read and understand code, and they should be willing to do so, even more so than the average engineer using some library code. They should be capable of understanding a library deeply and synthesizing and summarizing that understanding for users of the library. Just as tech writers in the medical field need to know quite a bit about medicine, tech writers in software should be required to know quite a bit about engineering software. There's plenty that do, but there's also quite a few that don't--I think it's a side effect of the field's relative youth. I really wish more writers would code and do exactly the things you mention, such as implement robust code sample testing, etc. The ideal technical writer, at least for software engineering documentation, is a hybrid of a traditional technical writer and a software engineer[^1]. [^1]: This excludes user-facing software documentation, which is essentially a totally different field than those that deal with writing for developer or engineer audiences.

timogoosen101 7y ago

Anyone know where I can get legit technical writing gigs? I used to get paid to write about Elasticsearch for a company's blog and that was pretty cool. Would be keen to do something like that again. I can write about anything in the sysadmin/devops space or in the penetration testing space. Thanks

BossingAround 7y ago
Apply to a large company. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, all of these and many more have tech writers as a full time position. Of course, there are not gigs. I know nothing of gigs to be honest.
- timogoosen101 7y ago
  Thanks, but I don't know if I'd wanna do this full time.
justboxing 7y ago
Hey Tim, Upwork. Create a profile as a technical writer, and put links to your docs. I've picked up partime gigs for API documentation, product usage documentation / User Guide, with screenshots and gifs on that platform. If you are US based, even better cos lot of Companies want to hire US based freelancer for TAX reasons and what not. Upwork search for client even has a filter that says "US only" and I've used that as a client also, to hire freelancers from within US. Besides traditional technical writing, there are also gigs for Technical blog posts on various subjects. Avoid the one-off gigs that are low paying, and focus on startups or companies that have already paid for other gigs (you can see it in their profile).
- timogoosen101 7y ago
  Thanks this is a good idea will give it a shot. I am not US based I'm based in South Africa. Do you enjoy writing documentation?

aazaa 7y ago

> In this time, I’ve read various resources on technical writing and documentation. These are my notes, both to help me remember later, but also as a tool to help me think about writing now. and later, in an apparent contradiction ... > You don’t need to tell the reader what you’re going to tell them. Just tell them. I think this point could be fleshed out better. Any piece of nonfiction writing, technical or otherwise, that doesn't give me a clear idea about its content may not pass my filter. I see this the most in long-form journalism. But it also pops up when authors focus on themselves, their struggles, and their aspirations in the first couple of paragraphs. Telling the reader what they're about to read in the first paragraph of a technical piece is a courtesy. People are busy, and they don't have time to wade through a bunch of throat-clearing at the start of a piece. They'll just close the tab and move on.

combatentropy 7y ago
Any piece about writing will violate its own rules. I think this could be a law ;) This is because writing is hard. It is just like coding, in the sense that I can revise it three times and still find ways to make it better the fourth time, or the tenth time. So no writing is perfect, but I think I can often tell when a writer has read the right books (like On Writing Well). Every now and then an article will jump out to me as being 10 times more lucid and concise than the norm --- even though it's still imperfect. Also I think the rules are not black and white. There is some judgment needed at every turn. Sometimes you will want to bend one rule to preserve another, and people with different tastes will either praise you or blame you for how you make the call.
voidhorse 7y ago
This is a good counterpoint. After all, academic journals have abstracts for a reason--when people need to get something done, a synopsis quickly helps them make a decision as to whether or not they actually found the appropriate resource. It goes both ways. I think this aspect of the craft is a bit more of an art than a science. At certain points it's appropriate to signal what you're about to discuss, at others, it's just noise. In general, anything that functions similarly to an academic abstract is probably useful (saves the reader from potentially wasting time, gives an overview of the general subject matter and idea without delving into details, takes about 1 minute maximum to read).

KineticLensman 7y ago

I always try to understand the readers before writing a word. Why they are reading. And what they expect to be able to do better as a result of reading, or what decision they might be making. If an author can't answer these questions, they will likely write something that is perceived as irrelevant, wrong, or simply 'meh'. This is especially true when writing 'technical reports' as opposed to documentation.

kaycebasques 7y ago
"Know thy audience" and "know thy audience's purpose" are the cardinal rules of technical writing, as mentioned in Marcus's post. Often times there are limits to how much I can know about my audience. In that case it's especially helpful to put an "Assumptions" or "Intended audience" section at the top of a doc.
- HenryBemis 7y ago
  +1 on that "thy audience", and the audience is not just the end-users. It is the 10 extra layers/people that will get to carry an opinion (and whose opinion matters) by glancing a document for 1min or less.

zelly 7y ago

Most documentation is so bad and so often out-of-date that I can answer my question faster by reading the source (or tests). Everything is so extremely verbose. I don't want to read a 7 paragraph essay about how this or that feature was developed and evolved over time; I just need a one line hint and maybe an example. Believe it or not, your software is not special. We've seen something like it before and get the gist already. I like the style of man pages, where everything is on one page and organized by the flag, i.e. actual usage (puts a hard limit on meandering bullshittery).

toyg 7y ago
> I like the style of man pages You are in the minority, mate. Man pages are walls of text that cover too much detail in too little space. A lot of them lack examples. Most people will take a simple task-oriented tutorial over an all-encompassing man page. That’s something that Microsoft understood very well back in the ‘90s, providing copious amounts of examples and tutorial on top of basic reference material. It’s part of the reason they saw orders of magnitude more adoption for their stack.
- nixpulvis 7y ago
  Walls of text are great, just use / and search for what you want. Between that and command history, I think this is the best way to navigate software.
dehrmann 7y ago
> Most documentation is so bad and so often out-of-date that I can answer my question faster by reading the source Especially within a company. Once place I worked, a few teams liked to over-document, though it wasn't enforced org-wide. The docs were usually not very helpful, outdated, and yes, I could just read the code faster. I wish they put more effort into better factored code and better names.
nixpulvis 7y ago
Keep documentation close to the source to increase the odds it gets updated. Prefer READMEs to Wikis, and use source comments to generate docs rather than word/google docs. Some doc tools even test examples for you! It's not perfect, and good documentation is an art, but if you care about your software and your users you'll try to communicate clearly.

wilg 7y ago

I actually found this article a bit confusing to read. I suppose they are "notes" but I found myself having to reread stuff a few times and it wasn't organized in a particularly clear way. Here are some notes I had: This is a very weird sentence: > In the 1980s, they developed a minimalist approach and created a wonderful Operator Training Manual for the IBM Displaywriter, imagine having to introduce someone to using a word processor for the first time. There is also a misspelling in "the four principals of minimalist instruction". In that same section it is confusing to bullet point the four principles but include a summary of the principle at the end of the bullet point. This makes it hard to skim. (It's also self-referential, which the previous section recommends against.)

justboxing 7y ago
You will do really well as a proof-reader.

jszymborski 7y ago

"Don’t tell the reader something is extremely complex; likewise don’t tell the reader something is simple. The reader will make up their own mind about a concept being easy or hard." I think this is great advice, and applied to teaching. I can't tell you the number of times a professor has said "and then obviously it follows that" or "it's easy to see that". Nearly every time that was uttered in a lecture I wanted to hurl my textbook at the board. Looking for alternatives? "Is it easy?" or "It might be obvious" work fine. Maybe use those moments as opportunities to check in with your audience. In the written context, maybe offer end/footnotes explaining why it might be obvious/easy.

abathur 7y ago
Whenever I see this advice, or similar, I'm reminded of one of the "rules" I encountered in the style guide for an old MUD. Roughly: Don't write item/place/npc descriptions that tell the player ("you") anything they should think or feel. Easier said than done, though.
combatentropy 7y ago
Related: don't say someting is interesting. For example, "It's interesting that . . . " I see this preface more often than "simple" or "complex." Also there is a type of person for whom your introduction will come across as a dare to find it uninteresting.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

stygiansonic 7y ago

At the end of this article the author links to and mentions the four types of technical documentation: https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/ https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/ I’ve found this to be especially useful when writing documentation. If you don’t think in this way them your documentation may end up being an impromptu blend of more than one type, and hence may not be useful for a specific use case. Instead I try to structure the documentation for one of these.

tracer4201 7y ago

I worked on designing and implementing a data architecture at a FAANG. One of the things we found worked well was bringing documentation as close as possible to source - that way, making changes to one but not the other has a high rate of getting caught during code reviews and documentation stays in sync. The challenge with this approach was then accessibility for non technical customers who don’t care for nor have reason to look at source. Instead of building documentation pages, we leveraged a system that was a registry of datasets, individual columns, use cases, and sample queries... it was tricky to get right but we implemented a pipeline where documentation from code would get propagated to this system automagically. In terms of general technical writing, style is less of a concern I have. The real challenge is writing efficiently to convey sufficient information to the audience, without staying too high level but also not providing too many details. I often suffer from writers blockz

all_factz 7y ago

I’m a software engineer, but I have a degree in English lit. I find I love technical writing. Maybe it’s because I’m often writing about systems I built, so I understand them well and the writing comes fluidly — it might be less fun to write about systems I don’t know as well. Still, I find technical writing one of the parts of my job I most look forward to: presenting to my colleagues a proposed implementation, for example, is both a social aspect of engineering and a way to make sure your design is comprehensible and hence simple (simplicity being a hallmark of good design). I tend not to stress too much over whether I’m writing well: the goal is just to communicate ideas, after all, not to make art.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

Tech Writing is a waterfall job. What's needed is something more like peer review, where the "tech writer's" job is to ask hard question from the user POV during development - for varying values of "user", which would include customer, API consumer, and so on. This wouldn't be code review, because it's about features, interfaces, and expected behaviours, not the fine details of implementation. And it wouldn't be a PM job, because it would be peer feedback in the form of dialog, not management in the form of requirements and specs. And it should be continuous, so the doc base evolves in parallel with the code base. And it should not be an afterthought. This job does not exist yet. And it should, because virtually all orgs have a problem where individual developers become repositories of The Important Knowledge. If they leave it becomes hard to characterise system behaviours and architectures well enough to understand how they work well enough to replace/improve/reverse engineer them. So IMO there's a niche for people who are competent developers, competent listeners, and competent communicators, who can pull it all together, stay on top of changes, and leave a readable record of the current state of institutional knowledge about projects, practices, stacks, and interfaces.