Techniques for Effective Technical Writing

Good technical writing skill is essential for creating software documentation. A well documented product will make life easy for developers as users may refer to it instead of contacting the developer for information about using or debugging hence leaving you more time to do what you love, code.

Writing documentation for software products can be a daunting task especially when you lack the necessary skills for doing so.

Effective Technical writing and documentation of software products is the result of knowing the Five (5) Principles of structuring information using both text and design to achieve an intended purpose for a clearly defined audience (mostly, users and other developers). As a developer, the best way to ensure that users of your product get the best of it is to tell them about :

• The problem(s) the product solves
• The features of the product that solves the problem(s)
• how they can use these features to solve their own problem(s)

These principles when followed consciously provides developers a means for systematically presenting technical information in a manner that can be understood by users and developers regardless of their expertise.

As you begin to master the principles of technical writing, keep in mind that they are interrelated and often overlap. In this talk, I present the five (5) principles of effective technical written proven time and time again by renowned experts like Gerald J. Alfred and how developers can use them to create helpful documentations of their products.

haven built and deployed quite a number of products for academia and industries and written documents about product specifications , API integration and user manuals, I have learnt that a great deal of difficulty can be avoided if developers simply wrote proper documentation for their products that can be eeasily understood by anyone who wish to deploy or use their products. To master this act, i have studied the works of Elena Bazanova, Gerald J. Alfred, Charles T. Brusaw and Walter E. Oliu, took courses on technical writing and learnt the principles which i will sharing during my talk