Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” by BaronSamedi on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @06:49PM (#13487375)

The IBM book "Developing Quality Technical Information" is the best I've read on technical writing. For writing style, pickup any novel by Hemingway and copy it. You can also Google "how to write like Hemingway" for some easy to follow basic rules.

IMO, however, the biggest problem with most technical writing is not its style but rather the almost complete ignorance of what it should contain and how it should be structured. Open source documentation is a case in point. Some day I will get around to writing an article about documentation anti-patterns, or perhaps a book, given the abundance of examples.

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Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” by perseusprime11 on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @09:04PM (#13488117)

Can you recommend some hemingway books?

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Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” by richeyryan on Thursday January 26, 2017 @05:16AM (#13490151)

I'd recommend The Sun Also Rises or The Old Man And The Sea for a first Hemingway book. They are both within novella length, so they make for easy reading. Farewell To Arms is probably my favourite, if only because of the last page. Hemingway rewrote it around 37 times because he had trouble getting the words right.

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Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” by mishchea on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @11:01PM (#13488594)

The Sun Also Rises

For Whom the Bell Tolls

A Farewell to Arms

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