Technical Writing Courses from Google

Normally, I love free resources like this. I don't mean to throw shade at Google... but can anybody tell me if there is a set of documentation that Google has created that you would hold up as a standard that you would personally like to match? I can't think of anything. I really think Google needs to get a lot better at documentation before they start passing out classes like this.

A while back i took both modules, they don’t take long to go through. Module 1 wasn’t any value to me, it felt far far too basic, i was really caught off guard by how basic it is. Module 2 was ok-ish. The lasting change these courses left in me was more appreciation for investing time and effort into illustrations.<p>I found other resources to be more impactful for me personally (e.g. jacobian &#x2F; i’d rather be writing).<p>I liked this model <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;documentation.divio.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;documentation.divio.com&#x2F;</a> - agreeing with people what purpose the docs they’re writing are for is a big chunk of the problem surface area. Having a model makes life easier. I’m not sure it has to be this exact model but this one seems good enough to me.<p>A counterproductive tendency I’ve observed frequently is when an SME is tasked with documenting their thing and they go off in ELI5 mode. So tutorial instead of how-to per the above model. Having that model helps keep those conversations short and productive.

I am not a native English speaker. I could never understand the stress on active voice. &quot;The vast majority of sentences in technical writing should be in active voice&quot;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;tech-writing&#x2F;one&#x2F;active-voice" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;tech-writing&#x2F;one&#x2F;active-voice</a> This is stated as an axiom without any explanation.

I wouldn&#x27;t rely on Google to learn good practices for technical documentation (unless they want to release their complete internal technical documents on how their recommendation algorithms work, that is).<p>Instead, check out a reliable open source project like SQLITE, they have great documentation:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;arch.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;arch.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sqlite&#x2F;sqlite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sqlite&#x2F;sqlite</a><p>See previous discussion of sqlite structure here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32250426" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32250426</a>

This course is great. I took it in person a few years ago, and I’ve since recommended it to quite a few people who got noticeably better at technical writing afterwards. There is not any great eye-opening insight in the course, it’s mostly good practices you already knew anyway, but it’s very useful to be reminded of them, and have them spelled out clearly in one place.

I&#x27;ve heard Google uses design docs pretty extensively for internal projects. Does anyone have a publicly shared example?

I am updatijg the user guide for an open source project, and found these short courses really helpful. It helps you write concisely and to keep the content simple. As well as provide some tools for structuring your docs.<p>The other resources I used were Diatáxis [1] and writing books I had on my bookshelf (Stephen King, Zinsser, etc)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;diataxis.fr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;diataxis.fr&#x2F;</a>

This is great stuff. Resemblance with academia and academic writing is recognizable.<p>However, I would have expected more tools to guide the process. NLP tools instead of writing exercises here and there.

In other courses, Google talks about recruiting from the graduate pool, perhaps they need some technical writers and this is a way for them to hire at lower cost?

Ha! Google is the absolute worst entity to teach technical writing. Go read some of the documentation for google cloud. Pick any single thing you might need to do to stand up a new service. I guarantee you’ll be disappointed.