The difficulty of language learning #

Learning a new language is unreasonably hard.

I read Non-Violent Communication (NVC) after a difficult conversation with a friend last year. I was trying to explain why I didn’t want to go on trips with her any more, and in doing so I upset her. She suggested that I read NVC to be a bit more sensitive in the future, so I did. I found parts of it useful, and parts of it overblown.

About the same time I was starting out as a tech writer, I heard of the Government Digital Service for the first time. They were totally overhauling the UK government’s web presence, and they were doing it in the open: sharing what they were trying and what they’d learnt, blogging about their principles. I found their work inspiring - laser-focused on meeting the needs of citizens, on being clear and human-centered.

In my first job out of university, a little group used to gather in the office atrium at 5pm - almost every day without fail - to solve the Guardian cryptic crossword. I think when I started it was just those titans of crossword-solving, Brian Harris and Charles Brown; with Chris Lambrou a later guest star, making us the BBCC crossword club (Brian, Beth, Charles, and Chris). Plus occasionally Jason for comic relief.

This has nothing to do with writing.

There are these sweets I like to make around Christmas. Every year, I forget the recipe I used the previous year, I try to find something helpful online, and I can never find one that’s exactly what I want. So I thought I should probably write it down.

If you’re interested in learning more about writing good documentation, there are tons of useful things you can read next! In particular, there’s a ton of useful stuff on the Write the Docs website, including videos and the archive of the newsletter.

I wanted to write about some of the things I look for when I’m editing. There are a bunch of simple ways to make your writing more readable - and I’m usually thinking about technical documentation, but this can apply to emails and other stuff too.

One of our developers was trying to make it easier for our colleagues to keep updated on a pull request (PR)’s status, after they’ve reviewed it. This developer was building a Slack bot to do this. I offered to help - it seemed like an interesting information design problem.

I came across this the other day when looking at Stories on Instagram (photos that play like a slideshow, and disappear after 24 hours). Stories take up the whole of your screen, and don’t have any obvious controls, so it can be a bit hard to work out what you can do, apart from sit there and watch the photos progress.

This door from a train toilet is a great example of adding lots of information in an attempt to fix bad UI design.