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