Good examples of technical writing

January 8, 2014 8:06 PM

What are good examples of technical documents? examples: business policies, research papers, references, documentation

I am taking an online class on technical writing. Can you point me to some good (and working) examples of documents in those four areas?

Business policies and procedures
Scientific and research papers
Quick-reference publications
On-line documentation

posted by ichomp to Education (6 answers total)

Anything Google does, really. Check out the online documentation for Analytics and Webmaster Tools. The challenge, of course, is that you need to use those tools to understand the documentation.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:30 PM on January 8, 2014

The Science of Scientific Writing, George Gopen, Judith Swan
If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs
posted by at at 10:28 PM on January 8, 2014

I've heard positive things about the documentation of these APIs:

http://klout.com/s/developers/v2
http://www.layar.com/documentation/browser/api/
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
http://www.twilio.com/docs/api
https://dev.twitter.com/docs
http://www.sba.gov/about-sba-services/7617

The Society for Technical Communication holds competitions for technical documentation. Some of the winning documentation may be available online. Google for something like "award-winning documentation" to find more examples.
posted by neushoorn at 4:59 AM on January 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

I really like Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2.
posted by scose at 8:23 AM on January 9, 2014

To elaborate: it's a pretty technical, jargon-heavy paper, and you will need to look stuff up unless you're already a computer graphics programmer. But it presents the ideas very clearly, with strong motivation and explanations. If you use Google to research the stuff you don't understand, you will learn a lot about graphics in general from reading this paper.
posted by scose at 8:27 AM on January 9, 2014

Research paper: Torrence and Compo's A Practical Guide to Wavelet Analysis is something of a classic. Its 5546 citations (by Google Scholar's count) are testament to the quality of the writing (as well as to the importance of the subject matter).
posted by pont at 11:18 AM on January 9, 2014 [1 favorite]