Technical Writing Courses
This is why “nobody reads documentation.” These courses are typical tech-writer overkill, missing the forest for the trees, then getting lost in the weeds (if I may mix a few metaphors). There is too much introduction and setup, then it jumps into the nitty-gritty, but never gives the big picture.<p>Assuming this was written by the Google tech writers, I’m surprised at how middle-of-the-road the offering is. I kinda assumed they had an academic-like cutting-edge writing department.<p>To write documentation, you need 2 things: an understanding of the subject matter, and a high-level understanding of what the readers want to do. The reader doesn’t want to use your API to list resources, the reader wants to give his/her users a list of resources for further operations. So you don’t give a trivial example of getting the list of providers, you give an example of how to display providers by getting the list and processing the various useful fields.<p>It also helps if the API or UI or whatever is logical and consistent to begin with.