Improve Your Technical Documentation with unique Writing Styles

Technical writing is an art that aims to simplify complex subjects for readers, enabling them to perform specific tasks with ease. Technical documentation audiences include engineers, developers, system administrators, and end users.

At EazyDocs, we understand the importance of creating engaging and cohesive documentation content.

In this blog, we’ll delve into some of the most effective technical writing styles and present some exemplary style guide examples to inspire your own documentation journey.

This will include an analysis of some of the largest companies that have produced excellent documentation & manuals. And how EazyDocs can help you recreate these excellent examples.

What Is Technical Writing & Technical Writing Style?

Technical writing is a specialized form of writing that focuses on providing information or instructions about complex topics in a clear, concise, and easily understandable manner. It is often used in various industries, such as technology, engineering, medicine, finance, etc., to communicate technical information to a specific audience.

The goal of technical writing is to convey information efficiently and effectively. This type of writing is commonly found in user manuals, technical reports, instructional guides, software documentation, and other similar documents.

Technical writing style refers to the specific conventions, guidelines, and best practices followed in creating technical documents.

Technical writing includes aspects such as:

1. Clarity & Simplicity: Technical writing emphasizes using clear and straightforward language. It avoids unnecessary jargon.
2. Structure & Organization: Technical documents are well-structured, with headings, subheadings, and a logical flow of information.
3. Conciseness: Technical writing avoids unnecessary details that do not contribute to the topic.
4. Informative Visuals: Graphics, charts, diagrams, and other visual aids are often used in technical writing to supplement the text.
5. Consistency: Technical documents maintain consistency in terminology, formatting, and style throughout the document.
6. Accuracy and Precision: Technical writing requires a high level of accuracy. Information should be factual, reliable, and precise to prevent errors.

Exemplary Technical Documentation Examples & Analysis

In this section, we’ll be analyzing how some of the largest tech firms and companies present and structure their documentation, technical style writing, the types of visuals used, etc. And see if we can recreate such documentation layouts using EazyDocs or alternatives for WordPress websites.

Google Developer Documentation Style Guide

The Google Developer Documentation Style Guide is a set of guidelines and best practices provided by Google for creating developer documentation related to their products and services.
It serves as a comprehensive resource for writers and developers to ensure consistency, clarity, and effectiveness in the technical content they create.

The Google Developer Documentation page, or Google’s any other documentation page for that matter, features a single-page, single-topic documentation layout. Which we can recreate using the EazyDocs single-doc layout. Single-doc documentation layouts are ideal for catering to a large and diverse reader base, who will be able to take advantage of a focused topic.

Our findings on Google Documentation Style:

Amazon AWS Documentation

The Amazon AWS Documentation is a meticulously curated collection of guidelines and best practices provided by Amazon Web Services for developers, cloud computing service providers, and end users. It stands as an invaluable resource, ensuring presentation efficiency and a clean layout.

Unlike Google’s documentation, AWS doesn’t shy away from presenting documents in large sentence clusters and doesn’t mind letting visitors click through some links to find the specific information they’re looking for.

Although this sounds repetitive and should complicate user navigation. But it does not, on the contrary, it makes this webpage much more readable and since the information presentation is segmented can also help users navigate better.

Our findings on AWS Documentation Style:

After analyzing the AWS documentation website, we’re confident that EazyDocs users can easily bring these amazing readability features to their documentation using our footnote feature, ToC, OnePage documentation, etc, and on top of that improve the documentation pages further by embedding a live search function that can index search terms.

Apple-Style Guide

The Apple Style Guide caters to Apple’s ecosystem developers and web service providers in a simple elegant presentation, that Apple’s branding is known for. It serves as a knowledge base on how developers should present their documentation and maintain a clean layout.

On Apple’s part, the style guide is ultra clean and doesn’t include a single unnecessary word or a navigation link. Instead, it has opted for a built-in search bar and a unique ToC.

The wording is kept simple and to the dot, great use of a mix between table and glossary for information such as how units of measurements and terms should be presented.

Our findings on Apple Style Guide:

Apart from the unique ToC design, we’re able to recreate all of these design elements using the EazyDocs Elementor widgets.

For example, here is a fully functional example of a glossary page with live search and tooltip.

Microsoft Writing Style Guide

The Microsoft Writing Style Guide is a valuable resource for technical writers who want to develop an unbiased and professional writing style and terminology for their documentation.

Our findings on Microsoft Writing Style Guide:

Microsoft Writing Style Guide is one of the best-standardized documentation examples that can be easily recreated with EazyDocs WordPress combo or any EazyDocs alternatives. There is nothing special about Microsoft’s approach making it very easy to copy and use for your business.

IBM Documentation Style Guide

IBM sets the standard for comprehensive technical documentation. Their content emphasizes clarity, utilizing well-structured layouts, informative visuals, and precise language.

Our findings on IBM Writing Style Guide:

EazyDocs can assist in recreating IBM’s documentation layouts, ensuring your audience benefits from a focused and accessible approach.

GitHub Docs Style guide

GitHub the popular code hosting platform features another great technical writing example, that teaches new developers how to best present their instructions to the platform.

On the surface, it might not look like much, but the GitHub Docs Style Guide details all the specific details that a developer/technical writer should include in their documentation. With excellent technical writing showcases, diagrams, images, and code snippet examples.

And since this is an open source platform users can add contributions to the doc.

Our findings on GitHub Docs Style guide:

EazyDocs excels at creating knowledge bases similar to GitHub, for example with EazyDocs users can easily enable team collaboration features. What is great about it is the fact that it has no coding requirement and can be managed from the front end.

Best Technical Documentation Styles For WordPress

Choosing the right layout can be a make-it-or-break-it deal to get your documentation noticed. While users have the option to create custom-coded documentation layouts, we highly recommend going for a much more convenient way of creating documentation websites using a dedicated documentation theme or plugin.

Taking advantage of preset documentation layouts, widgets, Elementor templates, and more.

Here are some of the best technical documentation styles for WordPress:

One-page Documentation

If you’re trying to recreate documentation styles such as Apple’s single-page documentation, EazyDocs’ One-page documentation is an excellent choice.

Users can create elegant single-page documentation that loads page information as they scroll more.

Conditional Dropdown

Conditional dropdown documentation in Microsoft style is a great way to compact and keep specific information hidden until needed.

This version is simpler and more concise, while still conveying the key information about conditional dropdown documentation. It also avoids using bullet points.

Footnote Integration

Footnotes in documentation are a great way to provide additional information or citations without disrupting the flow of the main text.

Footnotes are more concise, while still conveying the key information about footnotes in documentation. It also great if you want to avoid using bullet points.

Conclusion

The art of technical writing lies in simplifying complexity for the reader’s benefit. With EazyDocs, you have a powerful ally in creating compelling and effective technical documentation. Don’t hesitate – embark on your documentation journey today.

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