It’s difficult to write text that explains things.
How much content should you include? What sort of tone and voice should you use while explaining it? Should you err towards understandability or making it fun? What kind of role do images or other media play?
There are so many questions to ask and questions to answer when it comes to finding the voice of the content you want to write.
I’ve seen a lot of technical writing that excites me, but I’m not exactly sure why. And sometimes, two pieces of technical writing that excite me are almost entirely different from each other.
In this site, I hope to break down what makes good technical (and explanatory) writing tick. For example:
Why does Kurzgesagt (in their text-heavy book Immune) have such an unmistakable and fun voice?
How do visual-heavy art explanation books like those by Richard Yot and James Gurney explain physical and visual phenomena in a way that makes it intuitive?
And why do both of those examples succeed in explaining difficult concepts despite being so very different?
I don’t know why or how they do it, but I’m hoping to find out by making these pages.