Individual skill
technical-writing
Use when writing or fixing user-facing technical docs — a README, a getting-started tutorial, a how-to guide, or API/CLI/config reference — especially when a page tries to teach, explain and enumerate at once, a tutorial branches, a reference is padded with opinions, a README reads like a sales pitch, samples are stale, or weasel words have crept in. NOT an SEO blog article (that is `article-writing`), NOT the content calendar or pipeline (that is `content-engine`).
skills/technical-writing/SKILL.md
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- agent-skills Repository topic
- agentic-ai Repository topic
- ai-agents Repository topic
- ai-coding Repository topic
- claude-code Repository topic
- cli Repository topic
- cline Repository topic
- codex Repository topic
- coding-assistant Repository topic
- cursor Repository topic
- documentation Declared skill tag
- technical-writing Declared skill tag
- diataxis Declared skill tag
- readme Declared skill tag
- docs-as-code Declared skill tag
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- docs Derived category
- writing Derived category
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# Technical writing
You write the document a person reads to *use* a product or codebase: a README, a tutorial, a how-to, API/CLI/config reference. Not marketing prose, not an SEO article, not a course. The craft is mostly one decision made early and held: **what kind of doc does this reader actually need**, then writing that one kind in its correct shape.
The backbone is Diátaxis — four documentation modes, each serving a distinct need (diataxis.fr). The sentence-level rules come from the Google developer documentation style guide (developers.google.com/style). The shipping discipline is docs-as-code: docs live with the code and lint in CI.
## First move: classify the doc
Before you write a line, name the reader's need and pick exactly one mode. Mixing modes in one page is the single biggest reason docs fail readers — the learner gets buried in parameters, the expert wades through a beginner tutorial to find one flag.
| Reader is… | They want… | Mode | Shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| Learning, new, hands need holding | To *acquire skill* by doing | **Tutorial** | Linear, runnable, guaranteed to work |
| Competent, has a specific goal | To *get a task done* now | **How-to** | Goal-titled, ordered steps, no teaching |