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Pointers for writing software tutorials
(refactoringenglish.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Programming
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I stopped reading after the first example. One of them is described as "good" and the other as "bad". The bad one though does not actually fix the errors in the good one, but just leaves them out. The good one seems to be only an introduction. The bad one seems to be trying to convey content. Surely not very well, but comparing an introduction with content is like comparing apples with pears.
The two examples at the beginning are completely separate examples, not rewrites of each other. The comparison is in the readability for beginners, not the content.
I prefer my tutorials without reading someone's life story at the beginning. The intro contains so little info compared to the number of words being used. This reminds me of looking up a recipe and having to scroll past an essay on the history of someone's grandmother. I like it when documentation is as dense as possible, and ideally formatted in a logical way so it's easy to skim. Big paragraphs of English do not achieve this.
sorry for your disappointment
The first two or three examples are really bad but the rest are quite good.