What requires documentation

Before (or at the very least, after) you write a whole how-to about how to write documentation, you may want to consider what requires documentation.

Everything to someone

From my recent time hanging out with a toddler, I can speak to the fact that everything has to be learned, except maybe the ability and eagerness to learn. No matter what age we are, what qualifications we have earned, we all still know but a tiny fraction of human knowledge. There is always more to learn. What may seem to you like the simplest explanation of the simplest action (opening a sliding door, for instance) may seem an entirely legitimate effort at documentation for someone who comes from a culture of only pushing and pulling doors, or having no doors, or living in the outdoors, or else.

Something to anyone

Yet, needless to say, the same object can be documented in very different ways for different audiences. Do you need to slide the sliding door open? Do you need to build it? Do you need to collect the materials needed to build it? Do you need to sell as many as you can before the end of the quarter? Do you want sliding doors to disappear entirely and be replaced by a new technology that you have invented? In each and any case, you will need to learn something different about sliding doors, at a different level of detail. If someone is attempting to “document the sliding door”, they will need to determine which level of analysis and detail you need, or most people might need, or provide different levels along with a necessary guide for a reader to find their way to the part that they need.

Anything to everyone

And still, there may be a level of documentation, adjacent to description in literary texts, which is useful for everyone. It would need to be accessible to all, and yet contain some essential truth about the thing that is observed. This may be more of the poetic realm than technical documentation, and yet. A poem describing a flower is a technical text aiming to provide the most crucial information about the flower. Like every use of language, documentation is a give and take. In the end, do we not all write in order to help someone else achieve what they want? And thus break our own solitude.