In college one of my required writing courses was with a professor who emphasized that writing should be personal and human. Human beings are social creatures and we like to read about ourselves.
At first I thought his advice was limited to creative writing types of subjects. Surely it didn’t apply to serious technical subjects, did it? Yes. His advice applied to all writing. He explained that if the purpose of writing is to engage the reader and communicate an idea (and when isn’t that the purpose?) than the writing has to be interesting and the easiest way to be interesting is to write about people. Tell stories.
Joel Spolsky just made nearly the same point in a post publicizing his new book: Introduction to Best Software Writing I. And there is a similar meme in the mix for O’Reilly’s Head First Series.
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