Excessive Bold
Martin Fowler on the overuse of bold in technical writing — and how LLMs have picked up and spread this practice. The more you emphasize, the less power it has.
Read more [martinfowler.com]
Posts tagged with writing
What nobody tells developers about documentation
Users don’t know what your product does, how to use it, or why they would use it. You need docs to explain this.
Read more [newsletter.posthog.com]
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How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read
Michael Lynch, a software blogger, provides examples of his own successful posts and suggests strategies for promoting articles on platforms like Hacker News and Reddit.
Read more [refactoringenglish.com]
How to build a writing habit
A wonderful essay by Peter Suhm
Read more [writinghabit.com]
Writing one sentence per line
– sive.rs
A nice writing tip by Derek Sivers
Read more [sive.rs]
An Engineer’s Best Tips for Writing Documentation Devs Love
Some good tips for writing effictive, human-friendly documentation.
Read more [thenewstack.io]
I wrote 1 blog post every day for 2 years. Here's 5 things I learned about SEO
Interesting read for the bloggers amongst us.
Read more [flaviocopes.com]
Take the power back
iA writer is a great app to write text without any distractions (I'm not paid to say this ?). On their website the developers wrote an inspirational article that urges you to not only consume content, but also to create it.
You may have heard that the best way to deal with the “information overload” is to switch off your devices. To take a break from the Internet. Go for a run. Roll out the Yoga mat. Read a book. Talk to your friends. Switching off is good advice. But eventually, you’ll be back. How about changing? Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link.
https://ia.net/topics/take-the-power-back/
How to design words
John Saito, a designer at Dropbox, wrote down some very useful tips to improve the text in your UI.
Technically speaking, I’m a writer. I get paid to write words. But here’s something most people don’t know about me: I hate to read. ... You see, I mostly write interface text for apps and websites. It’s a style of writing where brevity beats brilliance, and every character counts. Writing interface text is actually a lot like design—designing words for people who hate to read.
