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Web3 Developer Relations & Community Building
Technical Writing as a Core Skill · 1/2

Writing for the reader who is actually there

Good technical writing starts with an honest assessment of who the reader is and what they already know. Documentation written for someone who has never touched a blockchain reads very differently from documentation written for an experienced developer switching over from a competing chain. Getting this wrong in either direction is a common failure mode: assuming too much prior knowledge loses beginners at the first paragraph, while over-explaining basics wastes the time of experienced developers and buries the information they actually came for.

A useful habit is to state assumptions explicitly at the start of a document, for example noting that the reader should already be comfortable with a specific language or already have a wallet and testnet funds set up. This lets each piece of documentation stay focused on the one thing it's actually trying to teach, instead of trying to be a complete course in every article.