Ask HN: Recommendations for Books on Writing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommendations for Books on Writing?

5 pointswwright4 comments

I want to propose a book club for writing as an engineer. Writing is fundamentally and critically important, but it seems that we don't emphasize it as much as we should for engineers (outside Amazon, where apparently it is a prominent member of the leadership pantheon).

I'm interested in any suggestions that HN has for great books on writing as an engineer! Accessibility and ease are important factors for a book club as well.

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On Writing Well by Yale professor William Zinsser was required reading as an undergraduate for my history thesis, and the lessons in nonfiction writing have served me well as an engineer and tech consultant. The political satirist Christopher Buckley recently recommended it during an interview as the single best book about writing[1] which prompted me to dust off my copy!

[1] https://www.nhpr.org/post/10-minute-writers-workshop-christo...

With regard to the structure of business writing and its relationship with clarity of thought, Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle. Really helped my reviewing and editing skills also.

Technical Writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_writing

Google Technical Writing courses (1 & 2) and resources: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing :

- Google developer documentation style guide: https://developers.google.com/style

- Microsoft Writing Style Guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/

Season of Docs is a program where applicants write documentation for open source projects: https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/

Many open source projects are happy to accept necessary contributions of docs and editing; but do keep in mind that maintaining narrative documentation can be far more burdensome than maintaining API documentation that's kept next to the actual code. Systems like doxygen, epidoc, javadoc, and sphinx-apidoc enable developers to generate API documentation for a particular version of the software project as one or more HTML pages.

ReadTheDocs builds documentation from ReStructuredText and now also Markdown sources using Sphinx and the ReadTheDocs Docker image. ReadTheDocs organizes docs with URLs of the form <projectname>.rtfd.io/<language>/<version|latest>: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ . The ReadTheDocs URL scheme reduces the prevalence of broken external links to documentation; though authors are indeed free to delete and rename docs pages and change which VCS tags are archived with RTD.

Write the Docs is a conference for technical documentation authors which is supported in part by ReadTheDocs: https://www.writethedocs.org/

Write the Docs > Learning Resources > All our videos and articles: https://www.writethedocs.org/topics/ :

> This page links to the topics that have been covered by conference talks or in the newsletter.

You might say that UX (User Experience) includes UI design and marketing: the objective is to imagine yourself as a customer experiencing the product or service afresh.

Writing dialogue is an activity we often associate more with creative writing exercises; where the objective is to meditate upon compassion for others.

One must imagine themself as ones/people/persons who interact with the team.

Cognitive walkthrough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_walkthrough

The William Golding, Jung, and Joseph Campbell books on screenwriting, archetypes, and the hero's journey monomyth are excellent; if you're looking for creative writing resources.

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