About #WriteTheDocs

It was over a year ago that one of my colleagues approached me and recommended I watch this talk.

Titling the talk "Draw the Docs", the speaker asked "How can I make drawing part of my job?" and walked through a 5-step master plan to bring visual vocabularies into workflows in a technical ecosystem.

As a long-time sketchnoter, I was fascinated! I remember posting this tweet and thinking I needed to learn more about the conference called WriteTheDocs, run by a community of folks who cared about technical documentation.

Fast forward a year, and this time the conference is being run as a virtual event over 3-days from August 9-11. Microsoft is one of the sponsors and I was fortunate that our team had access to a few tickets for anyone who wanted to attend.

Schedule

The conference this year is split into three days.

Aug 9 is Writing Day

The focus is on open source documentation sprints. Anyone can bring a writing or documentation project and dedicate their day to working on it. Or, they can join one of the many projects looking for contributors and spend time working on identified issues with support from project members.

I chose to participate in the Microsoft-run Accessibility Worksop and sprint, and it was incredible. Expect a follow-up post focused on just my Writing Day experiences soon!

Aug 10 and Aug 11 are Conference Days

I'm genuinely excited for these talks given the caliber of speakers and topics ranging from board games (as inspiration) to building accessible documentation and dealing with documentation debt! I hope to have write-ups for each day of the conference as we progress.

Also, as a first-time attendee, I was wondering what I should focus on and how I should engage, given this was a virtual conference. Huge props to the organizers for their Welcome Wagon Guide with handy links and recommendations!

I'm excited for the Unconference sessions!

Why does this matter?

Documentation is at the heart of technology understanding and adoption. Whether we are talking about platforms (docs for the services and APIs) or products (user manuals and troubleshooting), the docs are the first line of engagement between the end user of that technology and the effective use of its capabilities.

As a community and technology advocate, I want to make it easier for everyone to translate awareness of a technology into actionable learning. It is my hope that learning the tips & tricks of technical writing - and engaging in conversations around how we can make learning easier and more inclusive for a global audience - will help me be a better educator and learner myself. I hope you all join me.

Technical Writing Resources

Some resources to help your learning journey:

1. Microsoft Style Writing Guide - a revamped guide for technology communication with tips for effective voice and collections like accessibility terms that make docs more inclusive.

2. Google Technical Writing Courses - free self-paced courses that won't take more than a day or so to review.

3. Google Style Guide provides a set of editorial guidelines for anyone writing developer documentation for Google-related projects.

4. Mozilla: How to do an editorial review

5. Wikipedia: List of Style Guides - a growing list of writing style guides spanning muliple industries (including tech)

6. Community Writer Programs - a repo listing developer community writer programs (and more) that will pay for good content.

Calls To Action

I'll update this with more resources as I go. If you find this area interesting, consider taking some of these actions:

• Bookmark this post 👉🏽 get resource updates.
• Follow #documentation 👉🏽 read posts on documentation
• Follow #virtualevents 👉🏽 get virtual event recaps
• Browse #writethedocs 👉🏽 twitter discussions