Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Lots of documentation is dull and tough to read. That's because most documentation focuses on describing product features, and those are nouns. Your user's primary concern isn't what your product is, or how it's made. Your user has a problem they want to solve, and they want to know how to use your product to do that. They're looking for a verb. In this talk, you'll find the verbs that go with your nouns, and how that translates into readable documentation.

Speaker: Brian MacDonald

Brian MacDonald has been an editor of technical publications for over 30 years. Currently, he's a Technical Content Engineer for Temporal. He's worked on community documentation for DigitalOcean. In the past, he provided freelance services to technical publishers, with clients including O'Reilly, Pragmatic, Wiley, Apress, Wrox, Osborne, and Manning. He has co-authored two editions of Learning C# and Learning ASP.NET for O'Reilly. You can follow him on Mastodon at @bmac@jawns.club. He lives outside of Philadelphia, and enjoys riding roller coasters.

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