Modern Technical Writing

Where can I acquire this product? If there are multiple distribution packages, which should I choose and why?

How do I install the product? What are the basic configuration options, if any?

Developers extend applications or interfaces with code. They want to improve some aspect of an existing application or build something new.

Plenty of lightweight markup languages exist, but only three are really worth discussing: Markdown, reStructuredText, and AsciiDoc.

Tailor your approach to the person, come prepared to meetings, batch your questions into related sets rather than bothering people every twenty minutes with individual questions, and thank everyone for their time.

some amount of duplication is always going to occur. But for the most part, linking liberally, arranging topics in a sensible way, and trying to adhere to a single source model is a good idea.

you should break your writing into bite-sized pieces, often called topics, none of which overlap in content.

Technical writers, first and foremost, are testers and researchers. Your job is to know what people want to achieve and precisely how to achieve it.

The worst duplication sin of all is to store similar copies of the same documentation in version control. The root cause here is typically the desire to have one version for coworkers and another for customers, and it inevitably leads to a maintenance nightmare.