Blog — Technical Writing & Documentation

Documentation Has a Voice, and Yours Probably Doesn't

2026-05-09 Clinton De Young Finding Your Voice

Most B2B documentation isn't voiceless. It's written in "corporate beige," the hedged, committee-approved prose that signals no one cared enough to commit to a claim. Voice is the cumulative effect of small, purposeful decisions that help your documentation read as if someone knowledgeable wrote it to help me solve a problem. Do you want to improve your documentation? Pick a voice and defend it.

Your API Reference Is Not Your API Documentation

2026-05-07 Clinton De Young API Documentation

OpenAPI is an excellent reference, but a rendered spec is not documentation. A reference catalogs what endpoints exist; documentation teaches developers how to accomplish their goals. This post lays out five reasons reference-only docs fail your customers and what to write alongside your OpenAPI spec to fix it.

Why Your Japanese Documentation Is Quietly Hurting Your Product

2026-04-05 Clinton De Young Japanese Writing

In Japan, the gap between doing something and doing something well is not considered optional; it's the point. If your Japanese documentation was produced by a translation mill or machine, your users already know. Here's what that costs, and how to fix it.

What to Look for When Hiring a Technical Writer

2026-04-04 Clinton De Young Hiring

Hiring a technical writer is harder than it looks, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up in support queues, developer frustration, and user trust long before anyone connects it to the documentation. Here's what to look for, and what to avoid.

What Software Engineering Taught Me About Technical Writing

2026-04-03 Clinton De Young Software Engineering

Documentation and code aren't separate disciplines that occasionally need to coordinate. They're the same discipline. Two decades of software engineering taught me what most technical writers never learn: where documentation really fails, and why.

Why Most Technical Documentation Gets the Difficulty Curve Backwards

2026-04-01 Clinton De Young Writing Depth

Most technical documentation gets the difficulty curve backward: exhaustive on the easy parts, thin exactly where users need help most. Here's why it happens and how to fix it.