Writing Documentation When You Aren't a Technical Writer – Part Two | Hacker News Reader

Writing Documentation When You Aren't a Technical Writer – Part Two

blog.stoplight.io

125 pointspytlesk419 comments

I write the docs for Chrome DevTools and Lighthouse. In the discussion for part 1 of this series I mentioned that the #1 most critical skill for creating useful docs is to know your audience. combatentropy expanded on the idea [1] to include purpose:

> I have been a tech writer, and I would say something similar, that you need to know two things to write well: audience and purpose. The road becomes a lot clearer after that. Rules on writing fill whole books, but most writing would improve tenfold if writers remembered audience and purpose.

These articles are fine, they have good tips. But, after 8 years of professional technical writing, I strongly recommend focusing on knowing your audience and their purpose. This is a superskill that you can apply to improve any communication.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17839052

Any practical advice for doing this better? Or concrete examples of times you have done this in the past?

By “practical advice on this” do you mean how to learn more about your audience and their purpose?

100% agree with knowing your audience and purpose. But you are a technical writer, so these tips might be obvious. Audience and Purpose could be Part 3?

But for people that don't do technical writing day to day, it can be a little daunting when you are initially tasked with writing some docs. This is usually the case at smaller companies where people have to wear multiple hats.

> But for people that don't do technical writing day to day, it can be a little daunting when you are initially tasked with writing some docs.

This is what I'm trying to help with. If you keep the framework of "know your audience" and "know their purpose" in mind, docs will be much less daunting. Who am I writing this for? What do they know beforehand? What is their purpose of reading this doc? Answer those questions, and you won't need to memorize long lists of specific tips. Trying to memorize tips and grammar rules without having an overarching framework of why they improve your communication is what makes writing daunting, IMO.

I always start with the audience in any writing. I'm often asked, "write documentation for your tool" by technical peers and managers and I always have to push back trying to get more specifics. Am I writing for a non-technical end-user? Am I writing for a technical person troubleshooting the tool (can I assume they know yaml or how to use a Terminal)? Am I writing for someone who may reimplement or heavily modify this tool. Is this intended for reference or to walk someone through the process for the first time? All of those are documentation and technical writing, but vary greatly in what details you include and how you approach it.

In my experience, as a tool writer/maintainer I tend to want to document the implementation, but nobody cares about that until you leave your job (by then the documentation may be out of date if you don't maintain it). Most people's highest priority is a troubleshooting guide (which is difficult with a new tool) and a very explicit walkthrough for non-technical people (which is difficult to maintain because dialogs get tweaked and supporting tools can change).

I've been reading a stark comparison recently, ReasonML vs MDN. I realise this is unfair as MDN has had much more resources and time and the ReasonML docs are a straight copy of the OCaml docs, but compare the Reason List.map [0] vs MDN Array.map [1].

Given that the Reason docs are taken from OCaml and modified , I was wondering how well it would work to take the MDN docs and modify the relevant subset for Reason.

[0]: https://reasonml.github.io/api/List.html#VALmap

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Does any one else find the site design frustrating? Constant top/bottom bars and a full window height of low-quality content before the article begins.

There were some discussions about that here before. One of them is this "Make Medium readable again": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16516126

edit: Removed Markdown

I always wonder what people are talking about, but I've had this extension for so long that I forgot how bad medium is.

"Make medium readable again"

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readab...

Nice set of guidelines. Mostly "common sense" but given how (un)common that can be, this is likely pretty helpful for its intended audience. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com