Breaking the Rules E-book

Technical writing doesn’t have to be boring.

It shouldn’t be.

Storytellers know a thing or two about engaging their readers. There’s a reason why stories have always been a key part of humanity.

And there’s plenty of neuroscience to justify humans’ need for stories.

Breaking the Rules explores ways of borrowing techniques from storytellers and adapting them to technical writing.

It’s not just about writing stories. There are more narrative techniques that can be used in technical articles to lower the reader’s cognitive load, ensuring they engage, understand, and retain the information.

This book won’t tell you what to do. It will help you ask questions about your technical writing and find the answers that are right for you.

Table of Contents:

• one • narrative technical writing
• two • what's your (current) writing style
• three • stories everywhere
• four • cognitive load
• five • analogies
• six • story-framing
• seven • narrating the technical detail
• eight • narrative writing style and language
• nine • your audience
• ten • a near-perfect picture

The ten core chapters start by explaining what the narrative in narrative technical writing means. It's not just about writing stories—it's a lot more. Chapter two puts you in an inquisitive mindset, ready to think about your own writing.

Chapter three shows how stories are central to humans and how they communicate. Even neuroscientists found scientific evidence that our brains react differently when reading stories.

It's all about cognitive load. Your role as a technical writer is to reduce your reader's cognitive load to increase their attention span, their engagement, their understanding of the material and their long-term retention of it.

Chapters five to eight focus on the four key narrative techniques you can use in your technical writing. And chapters nine and ten get you thinking about your audience and about what it is that you're really doing when you write a technical article.