
Ask HN: Recommendations for Books on Writing? - wwright
I want to propose a book club for writing as an engineer. Writing is fundamentally and critically important, but it seems that we don&#x27;t emphasize it as much as we should for engineers (outside Amazon, where apparently it is a prominent member of the leadership pantheon).<p>I&#x27;m interested in any suggestions that HN has for great books on writing as an engineer! Accessibility and ease are important factors for a book club as well.
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eastbayjake
_On Writing Well_ by Yale professor William Zinsser was required reading as an
undergraduate for my history thesis, and the lessons in nonfiction writing
have served me well as an engineer and tech consultant. The political satirist
Christopher Buckley recently recommended it during an interview as the single
best book about writing[1] which prompted me to dust off my copy!

[1] [https://www.nhpr.org/post/10-minute-writers-workshop-
christo...](https://www.nhpr.org/post/10-minute-writers-workshop-christopher-
buckley)

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asplake
With regard to the structure of business writing and its relationship with
clarity of thought, Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle. Really helped my
reviewing and editing skills also.

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westurner
Technical Writing:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_writing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_writing)

Google Technical Writing courses (1 & 2) and resources:
[https://developers.google.com/tech-
writing](https://developers.google.com/tech-writing) :

\- Google developer documentation style guide:
[https://developers.google.com/style](https://developers.google.com/style)

\- Microsoft Writing Style Guide: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-
guide/welcome/](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/)

Season of Docs is a program where applicants write documentation for open
source projects: [https://developers.google.com/season-of-
docs/](https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/)

Many open source projects are happy to accept necessary contributions of docs
and editing; but do keep in mind that maintaining narrative documentation can
be far more burdensome than maintaining API documentation that's kept next to
the actual code. Systems like doxygen, epidoc, javadoc, and sphinx-apidoc
enable developers to generate API documentation for a particular version of
the software project as one or more HTML pages.

ReadTheDocs builds documentation from ReStructuredText and now also Markdown
sources using Sphinx and the ReadTheDocs Docker image. ReadTheDocs organizes
docs with URLs of the form <projectname>.rtfd.io/<language>/<version|latest>:
[https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
. The ReadTheDocs URL scheme reduces the prevalence of broken external links
to documentation; though authors are indeed free to delete and rename docs
pages and change which VCS tags are archived with RTD.

Write the Docs is a conference for technical documentation authors which is
supported in part by ReadTheDocs:
[https://www.writethedocs.org/](https://www.writethedocs.org/)

Write the Docs > Learning Resources > All our videos and articles:
[https://www.writethedocs.org/topics/](https://www.writethedocs.org/topics/) :

> _This page links to the topics that have been covered by conference talks or
> in the newsletter._

~~~
westurner
You might say that UX (User Experience) includes UI design and marketing: the
objective is to imagine yourself as a customer experiencing the product or
service afresh.

Writing dialogue is an activity we often associate more with creative writing
exercises; where the objective is to meditate upon compassion for others.

One must imagine themself as ones/people/persons who interact with the team.

Cognitive walkthrough:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_walkthrough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_walkthrough)

The William Golding, Jung, and Joseph Campbell books on screenwriting,
archetypes, and the hero's journey monomyth are excellent; if you're looking
for creative writing resources.

