Technical writing traditions are mostly evidence-free bullshit that focusses on appearances at the expense of usefulness.<p>I usually find &quot;official&quot; technical docs very hard to read - much harder to follow and less useful than a typical how-to book.<p>Writing is not code. Human elements like humour and story-telling make technical content much easier to understand and learn.<p>And &quot;topic centric&quot; should be something that comes out of testing. User testing should note the most common user taskflows empirically, and write those up in the docs.