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Tag Archives: Writing for non-writers
Recommended Reading: How to Think About Writing
Oliver Burkeman reviews the basics of thinking about writing.
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Articles, Technical Writing
Tagged Writing for non-writers, Writing for writers
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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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Working With Known Bugs
There are two types of known bugs in the world. The “official” known bugs – those that are known to the Head of QA and the Head of Development – and the “unofficial” known bugs, those that are known to … Continue reading
How to Improve Your Bug Reports
There are days when your bug reports are the only communication a programmer receives from the outside world (ignoring e-mails, chats, Facebook, Twitter and mobile texting); make them count.
