In the post on weak verbs and passive voice, I mentioned that technical documentation benefits from attempts to prevent localization or translation problems. In this post, I wanted to speak a bit more about what can happen if you don’t …
Read more →
Technical Writing
A recent manager insisted that I was never allowed to include the word “use” in any technical documentation I wrote because it was a weak verb and the manager said there was now a hard-and-fast rule about never using weak verbs. It was an all-out war …
Read more →
The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias where you have knowledge that another person does not and you have forgotten what it was like to NOT have that knowledge. This makes it harder to explain things to a person …
Read more →As a writer who works on API (Application Programming Interfaces) quite a bit, I have heard quite a few API documentation myths that I believe stand in the way of having good API documentation. Documentation that really helps the users both …
Read more →
A technical writer is usually defined as someone who writes the technical documentation that allows a user to actually use a product. But a technical writer is not necessarily skilled in the particular technology they are writing about. Is this …
Read more →At my current place of employment, a lot of emphasis is placed on who the audience is for our technical content. Are our readers developers? Are they IT Professionals? Are the consumers? A lot of time and energy is spent …
Read more →