Subject-Matter-Experts

During the course of a career lasting over 20 years, would you care to guess how many times I have been given data from a software developer that later turned out not to be correct?

A maximum of three.

Once, another developer informed me that something I had written wasn’t true. I provided the developer with a copy of the e-mail in which a different developer had said it was true. (No, I didn’t rat out the original developer by providing their name.) The developer demonstrated to me that it could not possibly be true. So I changed the docs.

Writing requires that you try to reach your reader. Technical writing doubly so. And that’s the part that isn’t easy. There are obstacles, and you have to do the work of overcoming all of them all of the time. Simultaneously.

Here are five of my rules for technical writers.

1. You have to understand your topic.

   In a lot of life, in conversations and in writing, you can have a vague idea of how something works. (For example, you can put gasoline in a car without understanding how the gas fuels an engine.) That’s not true in technical writing. You cannot explain what you do not understand. You have to know exactly what the ideas are, and what all the words mean. Although you don’t have time to become a subject matter expert in everything you write about, you must invest the time and brain-strain to become a student of the subject. And you must resist the seductive pleadings from non-writers to just clean up the writing of someone who does understand the topic. You’re not there to give a polish to writing that you do not understand. You’re there to explain. You have to take that commitment seriously.

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