jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #18 on 03 Apr 2020 and has tags Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools, Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing, Technical Leadership: Other
Google’s Technical Writing Courses - Google
Some of us, particularly those of us who were trained in engineering departments, got technical writing training — but most of us didn’t, and the training we did get was focussed more on reserach papers (which let’s face it is a terrible model for almost any other form of writing besides research papers).
Google has made available two of their internal courses on technical writing. The first course is sort of “Strunk and White for people who work with computers”, which to be clear is a good thing - it focusses on short clear sentences in the active voice, considering your audience, and good paragraphs. The second course focusses more on the organization, drafting, and rewriting of larger documents.
The pre-course materials are available at the link above; the course materials themselves and facilitation guides are available upon registration to their technical writer instruction community. This would be of interest to many of us individually, but also to arrange courses within our own teams or to our broader communities. The course is set up to be taught by people who are roughly peers — you don’t need extraordinary expertise in technical writing to facilitate the course well if you follow the materials. There are also links to external resources.
