Anyone who has ever built a product wants user feedback – and we in open source want it more than anyone else, and place higher demands on it than anyone else. However, this feedback can be hard to give, hard to receive, and hard to act upon.
My product is open source software documentation, and the same is true of it too, but, at least in the case of documentation, I believe there’s a way to make feedback easier and more effective – all thanks to linguistic theory.
The reason is because documentation is a product that relies on natural language. While we’re not all experts on documentation, and we’d be wrong to believe that we are, we are all experts in natural language, and we’d be wrong to believe that we are not. And – as I argue below – this makes all the difference.
Contents:
- Humans may be rational
- How to collect better documentation feedback with linguistic theory
Humans may be rational
An epic poem about humans, logic, language, and reason.
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