Summary of Technical Writing Two

Technical Writing Two covered the following intermediate lessons of technical writing:

• Adopt a style guide.
• Think like your audience.
• Read documents out loud (to yourself).
• Return to documents well after you've written the draft.
• Find a good peer editor.
• Outline a document. Alternatively, write free form and then organize.
• Introduce a document's scope and any prerequisites.
• Prefer task-based headings.
• Disclose information progressively (in some situations).
• Consider writing the caption before creating the illustration.
• Constrain the amount of information in a single drawing.
• Focus the reader's attention through discontinuities.
• Create concise sample code that is easy to understand.
• Keep code comments short, but prefer clarity over brevity.
• Avoid writing comments about obvious code.
• Focus your commenting energy on anything non-intuitive in the code.
• Provide not only examples but also anti-examples.
• Provide code samples that demonstrate a range of complexity.
• Make a practice of continuous revision.
• Provide different documentation types for different categories of users.
• Compare and contrast with something that readers are already familiar with.
• In tutorials, reinforce concepts with examples.
• In tutorials, point out dragons.