Harald Sterly
Shannon MatternOne of many things that’s struck me in my 18 years in various admin and faculty service roles is that technical writing is essential in academia — writing assignments prompts, department policies, open letters of protest + calls for reform — yet it’s so often dismissed as remedial in academics’ own training. Lots of faculty struggle to write clear, concise, bullet-pointed functional docs.
Jonathan Greenberg@shannonmattern yes, and not only academia. These types of communication are crucial for civic engagement, and active engagement in other organizations
@jgreenberg Yes, of course these skills are useful everywhere! I was struck here by how academics’ own training (except in rhet/comp!) often belittles and intentionally circumvents such functional writing.
@shannonmattern Apparently ChatGPT might / will / can help a lot with that... what we have tried out seems that exactly this is a point where it strikes....
@hasterly that would help tremendously :)
Jacob Kramer-Duffield@shannonmattern could not agree more!
Derek Kompare@shannonmattern OMG yes. See also: slide decks 😬
@dkompare That too :)
Clive ThompsonI've been thinking about this a lot in the context of open-source software projects
I can't tell you how many times, when I've across one that really took off, a key component in its success -- maybe *the* key component -- was the quality of its documentation
Random users could dive in and try it out without getting stuck and needing wait on help (or snarky abuse) from forums
Those projects *soar*
irwin@clive @shannonmattern Yes, yes, 1000x yes. Clive, I'm going through this right now, falling down a rabbithole of Docker, npm, Linux, node, dependencies and conflicts, and when you find a man page or a readme file that is clear and well-thought-out and well-designed, you feel like you're being taken care of.
Shannon, my feeling is that there is this expectation of academic writing that it has to "sound official" which often is at the expense of being clear and concise.