[ Thanks to Britta Wuelfing for
this link. ]
“To take advantage of the information available, you
need a reasonable grasp of the written language. Contrary to the
impression that many salaried technical writers give, you do not
necessarily need to know how to parse a sentence or be a wizard at
the black arts of grammar. Text that requires minimal editing is
always an asset, but free software documentation is a communal
effort. If you’re lucky, another documenter can compensate for your
less than perfect syntax.“Nor do you necessarily need a computer science degree. The more
knowledge you bring to a documentation project, the better, but so
long as you have developed expertise by the time the project is
finished, that is what matters. If software developers always
waited for someone who was an expert to document, there would be
even less documentation than there is now.“At a minimum, you need to become an expert user of whatever you
are documenting — a general rule that is relatively easy if you
are documenting a desktop app, but can be challenging if your
subject is a sysadmin utility and your knowledge of networks is
minimal.”