The Principles of Effective Technical Communication
This talk summarizes things I’ve learned over the past 18 months writing WordPress tutorials at WPShout, as well as co-writing an e-book and screencast series on WordPress development. It describes principles for communicating technical knowledge clearly and effectively.
Some principles to be explored include:
- Understanding the danger of *tacit knowledge*: knowledge you assume others have that they may not (example: “Just SSH in and…”)
- The value of analogies for communicating the intuition behind technical points (example: “WordPress is a factory that makes webpages: the database is the warehouse, the fetched posts are the raw materials, and template files are the assembly lines.”)
- Key principles of technical writing (example: remove appeals to simplicity like “Basically, this is just…”)
This talk should be especially helpful to:
- Anyone who blogs about technical topics
- Developers, who must often communicate technical details to clients
- Developers who have to write public-facing documentation, such as commercial theme or plugin developers