5 takeaways from Google technical wrtiting events
Improving the writing skills
Background
In 2022 and at the beginning of 2023 I was attending Google technical writing events in order to improve writing. The goal of this article is to share some takeways.
Event types
Technical Writing One: General writing
Technical Writing Two: Drafting, visualization
Accessibility: Accessible writing & visualization
Train the trainer: How to teach
Facilitate
As Barry Rosenberg pointed out in Train the trainer - the goal is to focus on facilitating discussion, not lecturing. Be the enabler of the conversation!
Growing up in Poland where the (teaching) culture has been very top-bottom - I found it worth re-iterating, especially to those whose culture also operates like this.
Focus on improvement
In one of his classes Barry Rosenberg said that the goal isn't to learn-it-all during those technical writing classes, but to focus on improvement. Join the class, focus on getting better - don't worry about perfecting!
Focus on the audience
General writing: Styling and the type of content matching the audience i.e. for business people, beginners, senior engineers
Accessibility: How a person with disability can perceive the content? i.e. running the content through a screen reader that the community uses
Lists vs paragraphs
The trade-off between easy to skip lists vs paragraphs is interesting one, including everything in-between - mixing lists with paragraphs. Worth experimenting with!
Growing career
Barry Rosenberg recommended having 3 pieces of writing as your portfolio
Kevin McGrail recommended going with Mozilla or Apache docs
How to attend the writing events
How to join those technical writing events? Go to the Google technical writing annoncements page
Credits
Thanks to those who were organizing the technical writing events I was attending!
Barry Rosenberg: Technical Writing One, Technical Writing Two, Train the trainer
Charlene Kuye, Kevin McGrail: Technical Writing One/Technical Writing Two
Tina Ornduff: Accessibility