Caddickisms

Kathy Sierra has a great blog (Creating Passionate Users). I’ve only been following it for a couple weeks, but I’m really impressed. She writes about (predictably) making people passionate about your subject matter. In her case, that’s computer - and more specifically programming language - documentation and training. As luck would have it, that’s one of my interests.

Her latest post is about keeping your writing interesting. Here’s a quote, but I encourage you to go read the whole thing:

So, how do you make things interesting?

If you were a brain, and you’d been evolving for a very, very long time… what would you find interesting?

* Surprise, novelty, the unexpected

* Beauty

* Stories

* Conversation

* Emotionally touching (the whole kids and puppies thing)

* Counterintuitive failures or mistakes

* Fun, playfulness, humor

* Varying visuals

* Faces of people, especially with strong expressions

* Sounds, music

* Shock, creepy things

and of course…

* Sexiness

One fairly straightforward way to make documentation/training/articles interesting is to crank up four sliders Conversation, Variety, Visuals, and Story.

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Tags: kids, music, sierra, training

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Learning, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.