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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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I recently attended a science fiction conference and, as I often do, I sat in on a lot of writing-focused panel talks. I got a great deal out of some of them and less from others but I’m always interested …
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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 →When you bought software, you used to always have a tome called the “User Manual” that accompanied it and would either have to plod your way through parts of that tome in order to figure out even the most basic …
Read more →I spent over a decade as a software development engineer in test (SDET) before I formally changed my job discipline to that of programming writer and then content developer. Many friends and family have asked or guessed why I made …
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