{"id":398,"date":"2015-07-03T11:13:16","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T15:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2015.boston.wordcamp.org\/?post_type=wcb_session&#038;p=398"},"modified":"2015-07-06T21:28:33","modified_gmt":"2015-07-07T01:28:33","slug":"explaining-hard-things-to-humans-the-principles-of-effective-technical-communication","status":"publish","type":"wcb_session","link":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/session\/explaining-hard-things-to-humans-the-principles-of-effective-technical-communication\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining Hard Things to Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The Principles of Effective Technical Communication<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This talk summarizes things I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Some principles to be explored include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Understanding the danger of *tacit knowledge*: knowledge you assume others have that they may not (example: &#8220;Just SSH in and&#8230;&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>The value of analogies for communicating the intuition behind technical points (example: &#8220;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.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>Key principles of technical writing (example: remove appeals to simplicity like &#8220;Basically, this is just&#8230;&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This talk should be especially helpful to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Anyone who blogs about technical topics<\/li>\n<li>Developers, who must often communicate technical details to clients<\/li>\n<li>Developers who have to write public-facing documentation, such as commercial theme or plugin developers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Principles of Effective Technical Communication This talk summarizes things I&#8217;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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/session\/explaining-hard-things-to-humans-the-principles-of-effective-technical-communication\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Explaining Hard Things to Humans<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12553567,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wcpt_session_time":1437332400,"_wcpt_session_duration":3000,"_wcpt_session_type":"session","_wcpt_session_slides":"","_wcpt_session_video":"","_wcpt_speaker_id":[397],"footnotes":""},"session_track":[386143,3558,8858],"session_category":[],"class_list":["post-398","wcb_session","type-wcb_session","status-publish","hentry","wcb_track-auditorium","wcb_track-beginner","wcb_track-developers"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"session_date_time":{"date":"July 19, 2015","time":"3:00 pm"},"session_speakers":[{"id":"397","slug":"fred-meyer","name":"Fred Meyer","link":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/speaker\/fred-meyer\/"}],"session_cats_rendered":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/wcb_session"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":915,"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/398\/revisions\/915"}],"speakers":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/speakers\/397"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wporg\/v1\/users\/pressupinc"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wcb_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_track?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"wcb_session_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boston.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_category?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}