Latest / The Not-Boring Tech Writer / Kate sounds off on being more human (and not boring)
Transcript
- Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we hear from other writers to explore writing concepts and strategies, deepen our tech writing skills, get inspired, and connect with our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. If you’re passionate about documentation, you belong here, no matter your job title or experience level. Welcome! Kate Mueller: [00:00:29] Hello, lovely, not-boring tech writers. I’m Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I’m thinking about or working on. I’m recording this episode at the very beginning of August, so it’s hot and sunny and I don’t have a witty way to introduce this. First, my progress update. I ended up missing some time at work this month due to some medical things, both planned and unplanned, so most of my docs work has been limited to handling new releases, rather than slogging through the remaining article editor updates. I have made updates to 38 pages relating to the article editor since my previous episode, but since I’ve also been doing some metadata tidying, not all of those were substantive content updates. In terms of the new releases, we released changes to our URL checker tool and our glossary term importer, so I updated our documentation on those. The Okta SCIM integration I mentioned in my last solo episode has since been approved by Okta and released, so all that work did come to fruition. Yay! And I’m currently doing some prerelease docs updates for some changes to our API keys, which are getting a lot more granular. Kate Mueller: [00:01:45] I also more or less finished my productive procrastination task of swapping out the hard-coded code samples of our common HTML templates with references pulled from a single file, which I also talked about in my last solo episode. I still need to make the same set of changes for our common CSS file, but those will be a lot more involved, so I’m just going to gradually chip away at them over the coming weeks and months. But it does feel really good to have the HTML updates done, since those templates are the ones with merge codes I had to comment out and fuss with previously, so I’m really loving that I no longer have to do any of that tedious, fussy work. Kate Mueller: [00:02:26] And of course, I’ve also been reflecting on my interview with Mat Patterson. The underlying conceit or argument or position behind Mat’s business, More Human Content, is that if you’re a small company, you shouldn’t act like a large company in the language you use. You may someday have to talk like a big business, but if you’re small, one of the perks is that you can still have a point of view, a specific tone or voice, a personality behind your communications. People accept this color from small businesses in a way they won’t from big businesses, and there’s a competitive advantage to being able to talk from a specific point of view or with a distinct personality. It helps distinguish you from other businesses and can help people figure out if they like working with people or companies like you. It’s also a lot more fun to write. Kate Mueller: [00:03:19] And one of Mat’s big points is that you shouldn’t sand off those rough edges until you have to. You shouldn’t strip out that personality until you have to, until it becomes a liability. And I believe that’s great advice for all small to medium companies, but it’s also great advice for all writers, both in your documentation and as you work to define or redefine your freelancing work. Don’t sand off your rough edges until you have to. If you’re writing docs at a small company, coordinate with whomever is doing marketing or customer outreach to make sure your docs are using a voice that’s consistent with those communications. Don’t run your content through AI so many times that it loses all feel of having been written by a human. You want people focusing on the actual content, not debating whether it’s AI slop or not. And as you position yourself for freelance or independent contractor work, don’t try to make yourself sound bigger or more formal than you actually are. I mean, still be professional, but be approachable. One of my own pet peeves in technical communication is language that’s unnecessarily formal or inflated. Use the language your users or readers use, making connections between that and the official terminology for things. Use a glossary function or snippets to help consistently make those connections, and share documentation in your portfolio that is actually useful and helpful. Mat used the word “desiccated” to describe some technical writing, and I can’t think of a more disheartening adjective to have applied to my own work or something that’s more antithetical to the premise of this podcast. Kate Mueller: [00:05:03] Granted, your users aren’t coming to your technical documentation to be entertained, but they’re also not coming to it to be condescended to or to become so bored that they fall asleep. They’re there to solve a problem, and their experience with the documentation should be consistent with the experience they have with your product or company at large, though still focused around those end goals. One of the surprising things in Mat’s interview was realizing how much my approach to writing in the Support knowledge base has changed over time. This came up when Mat and I were discussing how his newsletter writing at Help Scout had evolved over time, from being a summary of the most recent blog posts to being proper standalone content. And I mentioned that there are things I do now in the Support KB that I wouldn’t have done eight years ago. Kate Mueller: [00:05:51] The example I gave in the episode was best practices or any other clearly prescriptive guidance, and I wanted to talk about this a little bit more. I used to feel that being prescriptive or making explicit recommendations was something that would rub our authors the wrong way. That there was some kind of inherent risk to making suggestions about how they approach certain problems or standards. I didn’t want to alienate them. It’s a little bit like that trend to make yourself sound like a bigger company with less personality, right? You feel that there’s an inherent risk in doing the thing. But two things have changed with time. One is that I’ve gotten more comfortable writing that kind of content after thousands of support conversations and calls where I was explicitly asked for guidance or explicitly asked for my opinion. The other is that I got to know our customer base a lot better, and I realized that rather than being risky, this was content many of them wanted. A lot of our authors are lone writers or people who don’t have the word “writer” in their job titles, and they don’t always feel like they have the experience or the time to research things themselves, or they are part of a team and the team itself is debating what approach to take. So in many cases, this kind of input is really valued by our customer base. And this is the kind of “evangelism” that Mat and I talked about, where you’re providing content that isn’t really about your product itself, but does help your customers feel seen and understood and may ultimately help them get more out of using your product. Kate Mueller: [00:07:33] I really can’t adequately describe how big of a mindset shift this was for me. It sounds like such a small thing, but I had traditionally felt that my technical writing could have a little bit of personality, but should kind of just stick to the facts, as it were. And there are definitely cases where that’s all technical writing should be, but over time, I understood that what my technical writing at KnowledgeOwl needed to be was something more than that. Yes, I do write a lot of very task-oriented, step-by-step instructions on how to do things. The goal with those pages is to have people find exactly what they need quickly to answer their question or address their problem, and for them to have a good experience as a result. But KnowledgeOwl has always been a company founded on giving great support. We always try to give a little extra in our support interactions, and I started in the organization on the support side, so that ethos is deeply ingrained in my approach to documentation. And once a lot of those how-to or task docs were written and I had a good maintenance process for them, I realized that most of the requests I had were for documentation that was less black and white. Customers wanted help choosing between different approaches, or wanted to know more about how best to do certain things. As a fairly easy example, instructions on adding alt text to images are simple enough, but what a lot of our authors wanted was guidance on what constituted good alt text. Kate Mueller: [00:09:08] So what once felt like a risk, instead came to feel like an act of service, a content type that our customers truly did want. That it felt wrong not to provide. So I began adding some best practices, resource roundups, or more prescriptive guidance. I still don’t have a ton of this content. As you’ve likely noticed, if you listen to these solo episodes, it takes me a while to get through the big projects on my plate. So I generally only prioritize this type of content if there’s a clear, compelling need. And for that, I depend on my Support Owls to help identify those needs and let me know what I most need to cover. And I am very lucky in that I have good, smart support folks who also care about documentation and give me that insight. Kate Mueller: [00:09:57] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, your team’s next knowledge base solution. You don’t have to be a technical wizard to use KnowledgeOwl. Our intuitive, robust features empower teammates of all feathers to spend more time on content and less time on administration. Learn more and sign up for a free 30-day trial at knowledgeowl.com. Kate Mueller: [00:10:20] Some of this content is less technical and more philosophical, more trying to help people think differently about the problems you help solve, or just trying to show them different ways to approach the same problem. It’s still a content type I feel less confident working in, but the clear need for it has overwhelmed the reticence I had to create it in the beginning. This is the kind of evolution all documentation experiences over time, I think. Your company or product changes, you add or lose teammates, product or company strategy changes, or maybe you start targeting different types of customers. In all of those situations, it’s natural for the style guide or the content types you work in, or the templates you use for them to evolve as everything else evolves. The key is to try to keep it in lockstep with the rest of the product experience. If your marketing materials are quirky and personable and your onboarding materials are quirky and personable, then as Mat pointed out, you don’t want the world’s driest user manual. You’re going to want a user manual that’s maybe a little quirky and personable. Kate Mueller: [00:11:26] Another thing I’ve been chewing on from Mat’s episode was around defining and talking about your own services. We chatted a bit about how More Human Content came to be, and I keep returning to our discussion of keeping your own voice while trying to offer things that you’re good at, that you don’t totally hate doing, and that people will pay you for. I’m honestly considering tweaking my own freelance offerings as a result of this conversation, or maybe just changing how I talk about them, not because of anything specific, but just out of a general sense that over the last couple years, I’ve gotten a much better feel for what I do and don’t want to be doing, and also where I provide the most value for my clients. I don’t know exactly what that will look like yet, but I’ll be returning to Mat’s episode in the coming weeks for some inspiration, I suspect. Kate Mueller: [00:12:17] I also keep returning to something Mat said in the episode, that if you’re writing email communications like newsletters, you should recognize that someone has invited you into their inbox. We so often view emails as a purely transactional thing, a box to check off to say we did our weekly newsletter, and I really loved Mat’s analogy that it’s like someone inviting you in to come talk to them in their house. That idea of invitation, that idea of a little bit being a guest, and that there are certain ways of behaving that are different when you are talking to someone in their house, rather than having them over into yours. I don’t write our email newsletters anymore, although I did once upon a time, but I really love the idea of treating this as someone inviting you into their space and as a consequence, that you should show up more humanly or humanely and more personably. And in some ways, I want to extend that analogy to the writing I am doing. When one of our authors digs into my change management toolkit or some of our accessibility or image best practices, they’ve decided to engage with our content on a different level. It’s no longer about completing a task in the software, which could be considered more transactional. It’s more like a conversation, a bit of a back and forth. Here’s a bunch of research I did on a thing, combined with my own experiences and those of our team, and distilled into what we hope are helpful bits of guidance. And then you, as a reader, get to engage with that and figure out which pieces you want to take away with you and which don’t have any meaning to you. That’s very different from how-to instructions, where you really have to follow each step. And that kind of discursive engagement, that stuff takes up way more space in someone’s head and in their day. It takes more energy, it takes more focus. They’ve invited us into that space and decided to engage with us in that way, and that ups the ante a bit for us to deliver on more levels, to make sure we’re respecting that time and space. Kate Mueller: [00:14:42] I love so much of my conversation with Mat, because I feel like it centers the idea of human dignity and treating our readers a bit the way that we want to be treated, writing the kinds of content that we would want to read. This month, I’m hoping to review a lot of this, I guess what I’d loosely call long-form content to make sure that I’m properly respecting my readers and treating the topics and their attention with dignity and respect. Yes, I’m sure some folks will never make it to the page and will happily read the four bullet points AI generated from the content. But for my readers who do make it to the full page, I want them to feel like they’ve discovered a little treasure-filled cavern of thoughtful content that respects their intelligence and their time. I mean, how do you do that kind of review? I guess I’m considering this a different lens to review my content through, kind of like how when I read stuff from some of my contributors, I’m reviewing it as a reviewer and focusing on things that maybe are unclear or terminology that I know I need to standardize to be consistent with the voice and tone of the Support KB. This is just a different lens to read it through, I think. If you’ve got some content that’s not purely transactional, I would encourage you to do something similar with that content. Join me this month and try to create thoughtful spaces for our readers to be in. Read it as though someone invited you into their workspace, called you over to their desk, and asked you this question and see if you’re both answering the question and being respectful of their humanity at the same time. Kate Mueller: [00:16:27] As always, if you have ideas for topics or guests, if there’s a bit of the tech writing world that your life would be improved by hearing an episode on, or if you’d just like to tell us what you’re getting out of the show, please message us on LinkedIn or Bluesky @thenotboringtechwriter or email tnbtw@knowledgeowl.com. You can also reach out to us in either avenue if you want to share a job posting through our Hire a writer program, and you can also hit up thenotboringtechwriter.com and select Suggest a guest to recommend yourself or someone else as a guest or get information about the Hire a writer program. Kate Mueller: [00:17:11] The Not-Boring Tech Writer is co-produced by our podcast Head of Operations, Chad Timblin, and me. Post-production is handled by the lovely humans at Astronomic Audio with editing by Dillon, transcription by Madi, and general post-production support by Been and Alex. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. You can order The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts, stickers, mugs, and other merch from the Merch tab on thenotboringtechwriter.com. You can check out KnowledgeOwl’s products at knowledgeowl.com. And if you want to work with me on docs, knowledge management coaching, or revamping an existing knowledge base, go to knowledgewithsass.com. Until next time, I’m Kate Mueller, and you are the not-boring tech writer.