Modern Technical Writing

Good change logs convince people to upgrade, inspire confidence in the direction of a product, and help developers take advantage of new features.

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

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.

Users are people who just want to achieve something with an application, whether it's resizing an image, creating a spreadsheet, or searching a database.

What is this product? Why would anyone want it?

we can roughly divide readers into three groups: users, administrators, and developers.

Wherever you store your documentation, place a file named README.md in the root of the repository (or in ./docs). This Markdown file should include: A quick summary of the product being documented Instructions on how to build the documentation locally Instructions on how to contribute

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.

Making proper use of links lets us attain a sort of Holy Grail in technical writing: single sourcing.