Writing About Complicated Things

VPN Instructions

Reader empathy is a powerful thing. Fundamentally, help has to be helpful at its very core. It has to be something you could pick up and use right away. Below are two IT documents I improved. Since this help document was aimed at an employee like me, and I found it confusing, I thought I’d take a crack at improving the document so it can be more helpful for a wider audience.

Funding Accounts

For most of my career, I’ve had to write about topics that are hard to understand. Finance uses complicated terminology, insists on far too many acronyms, and uses a lot of structures that sound the same but do different things. In some cases, showing is easier than telling. This is an example of one of those times where a graphic tells a story better than words can.

Hyphens and Dashes

I wrote this document to accompany a short peer learning session we regularly had as a writing team. I wanted this document to serve a few important functions:

• Incorrectly quote Ben Franklin for comedy.
• Educate about a commonly misused piece of punctuation.
• Provide usable examples of correct use.