Praise

Over the years, I have been blessed by working with terrific people.

Testers. Managers. Developers. Software architects. Customer support people at various levels. Fellow technical writers. Executives. Subject matter experts.

Quite a lot of these people could write a lot better than they thought they could. When they wrote, they thought about the user.

Some of them couldn’t write well but they were great at talking about what they wanted to write… if only I could get enough of their time to interview them. Below-average writers, but still way better-than-average communicators.

While walking through my local park, I ran into a former co-worker from 20 years back. I had been creating documentation; he had been supporting customers. He mentioned to me, 20 years later, how helpful my documentation had been for him.

I do strive to write clearly for both users who need a quick refresher and those who are approaching the product for the first time, so I wasn’t completely taken aback by his praise. But in all the time I had worked for that firm, my co-workers rarely if ever mentioned that they, too, found the documentation helpful.