Top 5 technical writing tips and tricks for software engineers
In the previous blog post, we covered why engineers should invest their time in honing their technical writing skills and we also provided a finely selected list of resources for self-study. In this blog post, we will distill the best technical writing tips in an easily consumable way. I call them tech writing tips on the go.
Introduction
In a world where technology is constantly evolving, it’s important for software engineers to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques. To ensure that you stay ahead of the game, you should use the best known methods. Here are 5 tips and tricks to help you hone your technical writing skills:
1. Know your audience
The first step towards writing good software engineering articles is to understand the audience you write for. A common mistake software engineers make when writing technical articles is to assume that they know everything about the subject they are writing about. They tend to assume that their audience already knows most of what they are talking about. This is not true. If you want to write a good technical article, you must understand what your audience is likely to know about the subject you are writing about.
If you are writing about something that you are not familiar with, you should spend time researching the topic so that you can be sure that your audience understands what you are writing about. You must also be sure that you explain the information that your audience needs to understand. You should include screenshots or other visual aids.
2. Don’t overcomplicate
For software developers, writing documentation is an essential part of their job. These docs are published online for others to read internally and/or externally. This means that it is important that you write clean, well-organized docs. When you write, make sure that you use simple language. You don’t need to use complex sentences.
The next time you are writing, try to make your sentences shorter. This can help you to develop good writing skills. Each one should be focused on a specific idea. By doing this, you can communicate with your readers much better. This will allow your readers to read the docs faster and help you maintain documentation that is short.
3. Keep your docs up to date
The best way to ensure that you have the latest content is to make sure that you regularly review the content that you have already created. You can also ask a technical writer or a QA engineer to test and review your content regularly.
Your CI/CD pipeline can be modified to raise a warning if the code was updated but the documentation was not. That way it’s possible to automatically check if you need to update the docs. If adding a stage to your CI/CD pipeline is too not possible, try scheduling updates for your docs. Staff members at gov.uk use a bot to send out reminders on Slack when it’s time to do reviews.
They called it Daniel the Manual Spaniel and made it open-source.
4. Embrace more than just text
There is no doubt that there is going to be a short attention span for the modern reader. But that doesn’t mean that you have to throw in the towel right away. Instead, you need to use a variety of different kinds of content to hold the reader’s attention. The traditional ways of engaging with readers still apply. For example, you should use pictures. You can also try using videos. These are just two of the many ways that you can use to hold the reader’s attention. However, there is a number of other ways that you can use. You can also use animations. You can try using infographics. You can also use quizzes. All of these will help you to hold the reader’s attention.
5. Include code examples
When you write documentation, it is important to include sample code. This will help the person reading your documentation to quickly get up to speed with your project and make the documentation easier to read and understand.
When you are writing documentation, it is a good idea to include sample code that explains how to use a certain function. If you put this code into your documentation, it will be easier for others to use your functions. This makes your documentation better and allows others to learn about the features you have implemented. You can also provide sample code in your API documentation. This is especially useful if you provide an example of how to use your API. You can also include examples of what a customer can use your API for.
Conclusion
Writing documentation is an art. The better the documentation you write, the better your project will be. People need to understand your documentation when they read it. This means that the documentation must be well-written. Writing documents is easy, but it takes a lot of time to perfect the art.
