I couldn't champion your bulleted points harder. Honestly, if I had a say in it, any tech writer working on developer documentation should be able to code/build/perform/use whatever task or api they're documenting without the help of an engineer. They should be able to read and understand code, and they should be willing to do so, even more so than the average engineer using some library code. They should be capable of understanding a library deeply and synthesizing and summarizing that understanding for users of the library.
Just as tech writers in the medical field need to know quite a bit about medicine, tech writers in software should be required to know quite a bit about engineering software. There's plenty that do, but there's also quite a few that don't--I think it's a side effect of the field's relative youth.
I really wish more writers would code and do exactly the things you mention, such as implement robust code sample testing, etc.
The ideal technical writer, at least for software engineering documentation, is a hybrid of a traditional technical writer and a software engineer[^1].
[^1]: This excludes user-facing software documentation, which is essentially a totally different field than those that deal with writing for developer or engineer audiences.
This is what made my friend Caroline Rose such a great technical writer. She not only can explain things in clear and simple terms, but she was also an accomplished programmer before branching into technical writing.
Here is a story about the documentation that became Inside Macintosh:
> I sat down to meet with Caroline for the first time, and she couldn't have been more different than the previous writer. As soon as I began to explain the first routine, she started bombarding me with questions. She didn't mind admitting it when she didn't understand something, and she wouldn't stop badgering me until she comprehended every nuance. She began to ask me questions that I didn't know the answers to, like what happened when certain parameters were invalid. I had to keep the source code open on the screen of my Lisa when I met with her, so I could figure out the answers to her questions while she was there.
> Pretty soon, I figured out that if Caroline had trouble understanding something, it probably meant that the design was flawed. On a number of occasions, I told her to come back tomorrow after she asked a penetrating question, and revised the API to fix the flaw that she had pointed out. I began to imagine her questions when I was coding something new, which made me work harder to get things clearer before I went over them with her.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Inside_Macintosh...
One of my favorite examples from _Inside Macintosh_ is the discussion about the mathematical foundation of QuickDraw. Modern graphic programmers all know that a (0,0,0,0) rectangle is an empty rectangle. But why is that? Why isn't it a single pixel?
The explanation on pages I-138 through I-141 is what made this concept make sense to me. Here's a PDF of _Inside Macintosh_:
http://www.weihenstephan.org/~michaste/pagetable/mac/Inside_...
Besides that section, there are all kinds of examples of how to explain a complicated concept in simple and understandable terms. It's worth a quick skim of the entire book to see what good documentation looks like.
I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that it's an combination of higher pay and an interest in writing code over writing documentation.
In my experience I would say that a good SWE will attempt to write good documentation, as having to answer questions in the future about how stuff works over and over takes more time than just documenting things properly the first time.
While I'm at it, being a technical writer convinced me that software engineering and technical writing shouldn't be separate roles, because a lot of my time spent asking for clarification about things led to software engineers realizing they shouldn't have done it that way in the first place, and then changing it. If they had to write about it themselves, the feedback loop would have been tighter. Making them separate roles and paying technical writers less money probably started as some business guy's idea of division of labor.
He does say to use bullet lists, but I think this is more about structuring the content and breaking ideas into steps than it is about style or formatting.
His points all seem to focus on providing clarity and useful content to the reader and user.
I'd consider all of the following to be mostly style choices:
* Avoid Meta Writing
* Minimalist Instruction
* The "Constructivism" section, e.g.--Engage in an active dialog, invite users to act “Please try”, “See what happens”, “Explore yourself”
(The above is now what I'd estimate to be like 80% of the article)
The reason why I'd consider that a style is that if you buy a style guide, e.g. the IBM style guide, it would include similar instructions, e.g. "avoid passive voice" or "be more succinct" (though at a more of an implementation level).
It's possible you'd have a better name for it than 'style'. I'd accept that. My original point stands though; most TWs I've seen concern themselves with the letters of the documentation, and omit what I'd consider the most useful about documentation, that is the deep technical details such as maintaining code samples, or writing test suite for the documentation.
1. I think the faults you're picking on in documentation are valid, important, and also probably more organizational/management faults than TWs.
If the people who have to pay employees tend to be willing to pay developers more than they're willing to pay writers, it seems like the best "average" outcome you can expect--even if you go looking for tech writers who know how to develop--is that you get tech writers who can't or don't want to earn more money developing (i.e., they prefer writing over developing strongly enough to turn down the extra pay, don't have the skill/experience to earn more developing, and so on).
Dev/ops tools, methods, and thinking have a lot to bring to tech writing--but I can't imagine many orgs/projects can achieve this without a collaboration between developers and tech writers, or developer-writers sufficiently remunerated for possessing both skillsets.
2. Style issues in writing are much like those in programming. Code style doesn't matter a whole lot when it's a one-developer code base, but it definitely starts to matter when there are more chefs in the kitchen. When you don't nail down what the style is in either domain, everyone follows personal preference. It can work for a while, but it tends towards chaos that requires a lot more work to clean up than it would to be consistent in the first place.
Edit: This isn't to say you aren't right, but that the style issues are a sort of maintenance issue that may seem pointless from the outside but also do need to get settled (though, ideally without extended bikeshedding...)
> A lot of technical writers focus on the style of the text. For example, I've seen tech writers have long discussions (more than 3 hour-long meetings) about title capitalization in our organization.
In general I agree that there are some technical writers who focus way too much on style. I also think that the list of practices that you described --- usability editing your docs, using a CI system and importing sections of the code samples into the docs to ensure that they're always working, being politically forceful about making sure that docs are treated as part of the core product and not an afterthought --- are all great practices. I agree that the practices you described should be established first before any debates about style.
Moving on, I emphatically disagree that minimalist and constructivist instruction are "style" considerations.
Style considerations are arbitrary decisions that you consistently follow in order to convey a sense of professionalism. In your first comment you provided a perfect example of a style consideration: title capitalization (e.g. whether to format your title like this "How to debug your code" or like this "How To Debug Your Code"). If we A/B tested a document to see if there was any change in user success rate based on title capitalization, there would be no difference.
Minimalist and constructivist instruction are guidelines on how to create effective instruction. For example, the minimalist guideline to explain how to recover from errors is a hugely valuable practice which is extremely obvious once you are exposed to the idea, but is somehow a practice that many forget to do.
To put it another way, if we A/B test a documentation set that follows minimalist or constructivist guidelines with a documentation set written by someone who doesn't understand those principles, I will wager money that the minimalist/constructivist doc set will lead to higher user success rates, however we agree to objectively measure that.
Avoiding passive voice is another example of something that may seem like a style consideration but actually goes a long way towards making your communication much more effective. The problem with the passive voice is that it often makes the subject of an action ambiguous. For example if you write "the script is updated" it's not clear who updates the script. If it's something that the user needs to do, it's much better to say "you need to update the script". If the user reads the passive phrasing "the script is updated" and they don't understand that they need to take an action, that's the potential difference between user success and failure.
As a meta note I'd really appreciate if you didn't say "most technical writers focus too much on style" and instead would say something like "the technical writers I've worked with focus too much on style". This is the equivalent of saying "most software engineers are code monkeys with no social skills" and it's really damaging to the credibility of my industry. But I do agree that there are some who focus too much on that BS and you have my word that I'm trying to rid my industry of that bad habit.
Sure. What I was saying is that if you do A/B testing of docs that are written in a non-minimalistic way with correct, functioning code, and docs written in the best style with code samples that do not work, the former will have more value and will generate more of the before-agreed metrics than the later. Consequently, focus on minimalism should come after focus on technical expertise, which is not my experience (and I would go as far to say that it's not the practise of something like 80% of the field).
> As a meta note I'd really appreciate if you didn't say "most technical writers focus too much on style" and instead would say something like "the technical writers I've worked with focus too much on style".
I did say that. I said:
- "... most TWs I've seen ..."
- "A lot of technical writers focus ..."
- "... I've seen tech writers have ..."
I'll grant that there's missing one "... I've seen" in the list above :). But, of course it's only my experience. I don't know tech writers at Google, for example, or Amazon.
> This is the equivalent of saying "most software engineers are code monkeys with no social skills"
It's not because of the ad-hominem.
> What I was saying is that if you do A/B testing of docs that are written in a non-minimalistic way with correct, functioning code, and docs written in the best style with code samples that do not work, the former will have more value and will generate more of the before-agreed metrics than the later.
Yes, also in agreement here. Usable docs is the table stakes.
Sorry about putting words in your mouth! I must have got triggered and jumped the gun without being very careful about looking at the exact words you used.
I wish tech writers would channel their focus elsewhere:
- If you haven't got it working, don't document it. Getting information by talking to SWEs is not enough. Your docs will lack depth and preciseness, and it will show. A lot.
- Show fully qualified imports in code samples. If you don't know what that is, ask SWEs. Given a computer with installed dependencies (such as Maven, Pip, npm, etc.), even your (grand)mother should be able to follow the docs.
- Create automated testsuide for your code samples.
- Mandate that lack of docs be a blocker for a release.
When there are docs written in perfect style and English, yet none of the code samples works, or when I have to spend 30 minutes finishing the "obvious" parts of the code to get it to work, that's when I get really frustrated.
The article seems to be deeply focused on the style. I can't remember when I got frustrated with documentation because the style was bad, or because the sentences were too long.