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How to be a good technical writer

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A person asked the question "i want to become insanely good at technical writing, any tips?" on X and received some good replies. Below I am collecting the good ones that I liked:

Arpit Bhayani replied:

write a lot, a lot.

I have been writing since 2012, and it is a form of meditation for me.

I write everyday, it makes me think harder, it helps me articulate my thoughts well, more importantly it makes me more empathetic.

Ayush Chaurasia replied:

Imho, The popular advise 'write more' improves only grammar and vocabulary. neither are important for great technical writing.

What works best for me is writing with either of these in mind:

  1. What if I were explaining it to my friends
  2. What if I were to learn this over again.

Prateek Joshi replied:

writing is a lagging indicator of observing + doing + thinking. if you keep up the activity, you’ll have a bunch of interesting stuff to say (which can be translated into the written form).

Prabhdeep replied:

I write technical articles on medium, here are a few tips...

  1. Explain the "why" and how things tie in together. Explain things intuitively instead of dropping plain facts.
  2. Storyboard. Write the subtitles first, and then fill in the information. That way, your writing won't be all over the place.
  3. Spend time explaining the foundations briefly at the start. That way, nobody will be discouraged to read.
  4. Emphasize the applications. Why is this technical thing important?

And most importantly, write a lot. Over time, you'll begin to develop an intuition on how to write better. That's how I improved.

Vincy replied:

Remember the phrase "MMM: Meat, Material, Medium" as a framework for good content production. By Gary Vaynerchuk (GaryVee).

Breakdown of MMM in Content Creation:

Meat: The core substance or valuable message of the content.

Material: The quality of the content (research, storytelling, production value).

Medium: The platform or format where the content is shared (video, podcast, blog, etc.).

Gary Vee emphasizes that great content must have strong substance (Meat), be well-produced (Material), and be optimized for the right platform (Medium).

boisselle replied:

read more technical papers, copy them, rearrange them, write your own.

Arunachalam replied:

I recommend you to follow technical style guide used by freCodeCamp or Digital ocean.

I'm personally a technical writer at freeCodeCamp. It's a well recognised platform

Here's the link

Apart from this, most of the people suggested that the more you write the better you become.

I think, the best way here would be to imitate others (who are good at it), and then innovate when writing for yourself.

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