No Fluff
People are trying to achieve a goal and are reading your text because they think it might help them with their task. Write short, clear, obvious sentences. Keep individual paragraphs short. Don’t waste your readers’ time. Keep their goal in mind.
As Patricia Wright puts it in the book Quality of Technical Documentation [SJ94], “Writers often believe that they should communicate more than readers want to know.”
When you’re writing, ask yourself, “Does this sentence help the user?” If it doesn’t, get rid of it.
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