What Writing Fiction Teaches You About Writing Documentation
summary
Adapts Elmore Leonard’s rules into concrete doc guidance: avoid broad ecosystem intros, use simple actionable verbs, cut adverbs and excess punctuation, ban plot twists, and link to deep dives rather than recap. Uses John Scalzi’s dual-perspective novels to justify writing outlines for different user personas, recommends the Hemingway App for brevity checks, runs a swipe file in Evernote, and launches docs early to beta-test with community reviewers like beta readers and fan forums (some reach 50,000 users).
AI-written summary · about
chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 1:47Bringing fiction to docs
- 4:15Knowing your audience
- 7:51Write what you know
- 11:48Be concise like Hemingway
- 12:34Adding emotion to docs
- 16:29Kill your darlings
- 17:54Importance of context
- 20:26Reading order matters
- 22:50Canon and community docs
- 26:03Beta readers for docs
- 27:26Read widely to improve
related talks
10mWriting effective documentation
01h 24mWriting Documentation - Practices and Theory
44mWriting For Nerds - Blogging For Fun and (Not Much) Profit
29mHumanizing Your Documentation
55mThe Emperor Has No Docs
33mWhat The Doc?!?! How to Write and Read Documentation That Allows You To Get Sh*t Done!
22mWrite Prose, Not just programs
28mImproving Your Documentation: A talk for developers who want to write stuff good