Keep It Simple

Everything I write on this blog will be based on two principles:

• Keep it simple
• Put the user first

It's easy to argue that you're not putting the user first if you don't keep your doc simple. That's why I chose simplicity as the topic for this first post.

One of the first things I was taught as a fledgling technical editor was that I needed to forget about all of that writing stuff I learned in college. There's a place for a nice complex sentence, but that place is not in tech writing. Same goes for metaphors and similes and many other hallmarks of good academic writing.

My first boss said that the idea is to write around an eighth grade level. I'd say that's about right. You want to use simple words and sentences that are easy to parse and do not contain multiple ideas.

The sole purpose of product documentation is to help people find the information they need so they can get back to their job or their game or whatever it is you're helping them do. To help them, you want to make everything easy for them.

Unlike academic writing or literary fiction, technical writing is not the place to show off your writing skills. Actually, you want to be completely invisible. The only thing that matters is the information you want to convey, and that should be presented in an easy-to-navigate manner. The object is to help your reader get in and out of the document as quickly as possible.

A user-centered, task-based approach works best. In everything you do, think of what you're trying to help the user achieve, and then make that task as simple as you possibly can.



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