technical-writing

Paths below are relative to this skill's directory.

Scope

The documents a project ships to people who did not write it: the README, the documentation site and its four kinds of page, tutorials, how-to guides, reference, concept pages and technical articles, architecture decision records, and the changelog. Also the maintenance of all of it — finding the lines that have quietly stopped being true, and fixing them without rewriting the page.

Writing here means three things that are not the same: choosing what kind of document this is and what belongs on it, making the prose and the examples hold up, and — for the README, which is read before anything else and rendered by several different engines — composing the page so the answers arrive first and survive every surface the file is published to. Most documentation defects are the first kind wearing the second's clothes.