Poorly Written Documentation Makes My Head Hurt

I pride myself on being an autodidact when it comes to techie stuff, and I’ve done pretty well, especially considering I’m an analog age English major. But I do spend an inordinate amount of time banging my head against walls when I am trying to learn something,  not because I’m a slow learner, but because instructions are just not clear.

Often, documentation jumps ahead a few steps leaving new users without the basic information needed to understand the process. So frustrating.

Writers with geek tendencies, rather than geeks with writer tendencies, need to write documentation. Good documentation is written with a “beginner’s mind” — innocent of preconceptions and prejudices.