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Hi, former O'Reilly editor and current CTO here. "Improve technical writing" is broad. First, I'd make sure everyone knows what kinds of docs it's possible to
by gnat 4y ago
Hi, former O'Reilly editor and current CTO here.
"Improve technical writing" is broad. First, I'd make sure everyone knows what kinds of docs it's possible to write. The Diátaxis Framework <https://diataxis.fr/ https://diataxis.fr/> is good for that. Have a good discussion about what types of docs make sense for your environment -- who is the audience, what do they come with, what are they trying to do?
If they need help at the micro level of putting words together well, check out Lynn Dupre's "Bugs in Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose" <https://www.amazon.com/BUGS-Writing-Revised-Guide-Debugging/dp/020137921X https://www.amazon.com/BUGS-Writing-Revised-Guide-Debugging/...>.
If they're curious about the skills of a technical writer, Google has some good courses. <https://developers.google.com/tech-writing https://developers.google.com/tech-writing> We have had some first time tech writers and they identified this as a useful resource.
Structure is an overlooked aspect of writing -- we're familiar with alphabetical lists of API function names but this is only useful for reference material. Much of writing consists of modelling the reader in your head and structuring your prose so that you don't confuse that reader by talking about things before they're defined. Readers are a lot like simple compilers in that respect -- if you want to talk about something before it's covered in detail, you have to declare it first. A lot of becoming a good writer is just internalizing the literary smells for "this will confuse".
Like everything they want to improve at, your engineers need to attempt writing and then receive feedback on it. When I give people feedback, it's not just a rewrite -- I talk them through my changes, from language choice to overall structure, and explain why I made the change and think the change is better than the original. And if they wrote something particularly well, then I check they understand why it works.
Good luck!
- gnat 4y agoPS you asked for things like courses. I went looking when our first-time tech writer wanted to grow her skills. There are surprisingly few online options for anything beyond 101. If you do discover good 'uns, please share back. Thanks!
- euroderf 4y ago> if you want to talk about something before it's covered in detail, you have to declare it first. For software, part of technical writing is providing the reader a conceptual model that they can work with in their mind. But another part of technical writing is discovering that the user interface does not consistently use that conceptual model, or any other conceptual model, and so it inevitably brings in suggestions for improvements to UI/UX.