Oliver Burkeman reviews the basics of thinking about writing.
Tag Archives: Writing for non-writers
Quick Writing Tip: Don’t Add Images Until the Text is Done
Here’s a quick writing tip for user manuals: don’t add your images to the manual until you’re done writing your text. This has two advantages. The first is that when you add images one at a time over the long course of writing a manual, it’s easy to overdo it. When you add them all …
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Stump Documents: on Failures to Write Transferable Information
There is a general problem in software, more pronounced in minimalist Agile efforts, of documents that look good at the time of writing, but do a poor job of transferring information. I call these “stump” documents because readers are stumped when they try to learn from them. The main difference between stump and transferable documents …
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Punctuation in UI: the Oxford Comma
The Oxford comma, or serial comma, is the comma that sometimes appears in a list before the last “and”, “or” and so on. It has somehow become a battleground of punctuation, because some people always use it while others never do, and emotions run high. I recommend letting go of any emotional attachment to the …
Capital!
Capitalization seems to be a weak point for many in software. Perhaps because code (and odd company names) teach us that words can have a capital letter in the middle, capitalization of UI text is often more creative than is strictly necessary. Capital letters aren’t important only because some of your users are grammar geeks; …
Don’t Dumb it Down; Layer it Up – Writing Tips for Engineers
When explaining complicated ideas, your goal shouldn’t be to dumb things down – you’re here to teach, not to help people avoid learning. But the best way to teach is not to start at the expert level and hope your readers follow along – it’s to start at the bottom and layer it up. Give …
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