Writing and Tech Documentation.

cubiclecreativity

The tough part about good documentation is that everything has to make sense. All the stuff has to ‘line up’ along the user stories for the use of the documentation.

There’s the high level story and the lower level stories that make the high level story work – and those same low level stories can have multiple dimensions of their own if written conscientiously with modern tools.

Documentation is usually dry and boring. Dry and boring is great reading for those who read the DOS manuals and Unix manuals end to end (I did), and you can amaze other people with how much you can’t be understood when you talk. That’s where the social engineering aspects of documentation come into play. Or, as writers would call it, writing. The documentation has to be sticky in the marketing sense, such that when someone reads it, they remember it. For the software engineering side – the technical side – less so. On the user side, it has to be… usable.

We’ve come a long way when it comes to our capacity to organize documentation online1. The actual writing, though, has to lean toward a SEO type of writing – repeating key phrases and using possible words and phrases that a user might search for. This requires understanding how a product is expected to be used as well as how it might be used. The latter is not as important for the planned use, but is important for disruptive use cases that might pop up on the radar and allow a business to leverage quickly.

Simply put, good technical writing allows for what is planned, and enables potential uses1.

1 Something I’ll be writing about some more this week.
https://knowprose.com/tag/technical-documentation/
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