Hey, question for folks out there - if I were looking for good examples of really excellent technical storytelling… or resources for principles and guidelines for doing good technical storytelling; where would I look?
Asking for someone who is in engineering, not remotely close to my own work, and would like to improve their ability to tell good technical stories; I don’t really know a lot more than that, but thought I would ask to see if there’s any good starting places out there
Does it have to be in written form?
There are a few great engineering storytellers on YouTube, like the “Huge if True” lady, Practical Engineering, 3blue1brown, and a few others. The Practical Engineering guy also has a book that I enjoyed a lot.
In the IT world, Cloudflare writes and publishes some excellent postmortems after outages: Post Mortem
DigitalOcean also has some good tutorials, but they’re niche: Tutorials | DigitalOcean
What kind of engineering does this person do and who is their intended audience? It’s one thing to write a technical brief for others in his industry, another thing to write an explainer for the general public, another to give a live talk, etc. What is this person trying to communicate, and to whom?
(wrong button)
And for what it’s worth, my current professional work revolves around technical writing. I’m what the tech industry calls a “support engineer”, which is just a goofy term for a computer programmer who writes more English than code. I spend my days writing documentation and answering customer emails, explaining complicated concepts as best as I can.
What helped me early on was a general interest in English creative writing, especially narrative nonfiction. I took a few writing courses at community college and later did most of a journalism minor. I combined that with frequent exposure to technical writing in both tech and renewables, my two professional interests. Both the formal education and the informal exposure helped.
The best source of inspiration for me was reading narrative nonfiction books (authors like Bill Bryson and Mary Roach and Jon Krakauer), which do a great job of making otherwise dry and/or dense topics interesting enough to be page-turners. At a younger reading level, David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work and his illustrated books on architectural engineering are fantastic too.
But all of those are more aimed at a popular science audience, not necessarily for an industry colleague. It really depends what you’re trying to write.
I’ve always loved explanations of how things work, no matter the subject, but Isaac Asimov’s “How Did We Find OUt the Earth is Round?” remains the clearest explanation I’ve ever encountered.
I’ve been a fan of Julia Evans’s work at jvns.ca. She covers a lot of technical computing topics in a way that’s very accessible, at least for people with a basic background.