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I'm gathering data about trends in developer documentation for 2020. If you write docs for developers, please take this survey. (You can view the ongoing results here.)WTD podcast episode 14: Humanizing your documentation
In the latest episode of the Write the Docs podcast, we chat with Carolyn Stransky, a journalist and JavaScript developer living in Berlin, about ways to humanize documentation. We discuss dilemmas with transparency in docs (the balance between honesty and negativity), ways to avoid gendered language (including whether to correct workplace misuse of "he"), strategies for achieving plain language and clarity (such as by reading your content out loud), the term "user" and alternatives, how to develop empathy for your audience, why terms like "simple" and "easy" are problematic (even in Marketing), tools for identifying insensitivity and complexity in docs (Hemingway, Alex), what makes content sound truly human, and more.
Here’s a video recording of the podcast:
You can see more details (including mp3 links, subscribe options, etc.) here: WTD Episode 14: Humanizing your documentation.
For more information, see the following:
For some I’d Rather Be Writing posts related to these topics, see:
- Transparency in documentation: dealing with limits about what you can and cannot say
- Why simple language isn’t so simple: the struggle to create plain language in documentation
