Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

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> Isn't it better to have knowledge about software when writing documentation? I'm not talking advanced CS here, I mean basics.

I would say that’s probably about as much as you would want. The best technical writer I ever worked with went from basic computer skills to becoming an expert at deploying and configuring the database software we developed on myriad infrastructure. The newcomer’s mindset helped make the writing wonderfully approachable for anyone to read.

The process was always something like: 1) Learn how to do the thing, but ask really good questions along the way (I often reconsidered some of my own design choices from those questions) 2) Use the gathered information to write about doing the thing.

This is like when kids start to ask "stupid" questions, when in reality those are sometimes useful data coming from another paradigm.

I'd say that when a question from a child is called "stupid", it's more likely that the grown-up is the stupid one.

Children can ask hard questions sometimes, and grown-ups can get embarrassed when they don't know the answer. Instead of admitting their limitations, many adults will call the question "stupid" or the euphemisms "funny" or "strange", indicating that the child should not ask such difficult questions.

Sounds like a paradox of competence.

Well, there's more than one relevant sense of "competence". Competence in the sense of acquired skills can be harmful to (introductory) tech writing, because experts pay attention to different things than beginners do.

Competence in the sense of intelligence is helpful, and was called for explicitly in your parent comment:

>> ask really good questions along the way

Exactly. The competence is in knowing which questions to ask. That knowledge comes from a deep and intimate understanding as to not only how you (the individual) goes about solving problems, but how human beings in general approach problems. Then add in that you have to know how people (again, in general) react to learning they were wrong, how people make and change habits, etc.

It's basically translating from systems-thinking to chaos ape.

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