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 on the relevant part of a picture or diagram by describing the takeaway in the caption or by adding a visual cue to the picture.
- 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, note problems that readers may encounter.
Congratulations! You've completed the pre-class portion of Technical Writing Two.
The in-class component of Technical Writing Two helps you practice technical writing principles:
- If your organization offers the in-class portion of Technical Writing Two, you are now ready for that class.
- If your organization doesn't offer the in-class portion of Technical Writing Two, consider joining one of the free public courses listed on the Announcements page.