Early last year, in the blog entry Doing a podcast interview about technical writing, I described an interview I did for the IEEE Software Engineering Radio podcast. Listening to it again this week I saw that I covered a lot of good ground. Since then I have thought of a few other points I wish I’d mentioned, so here they are in another bulleted list. Because of some recent experience I had enough thoughts about documenting APIs that I gave that discussion its own section below.

After listening to hundreds of podcast interviews over the years I finally got to be the subject of one myself. Nikhil Krishna interviewed me for the Software Engineering Radio podcast, which is sponsored by the IEEE.

I’ve done some copyediting as part of my job, especially with marketing material. Certain basic mistakes come up so often that I made a list that I’ve been tempted to give to whoever gave me the original content and say “please make sure that it doesn’t have any of these problems first!” I didn’t, but for those who are interested, following these simple rules will make your writing look more professional. The nice thing about these is that, unlike with truly good writing, no skill and very…