Approach to Effective Documentation Technique

Effective documentation serves both as the content and channel for decisions, ideas, tasks, solutions, and plans. Basically, poor documentation leads to disastrous and expensive events. Customers who encounter poorly written materials form an undesirable impression of how a company runs its business. 
A Good document is user friendly, has better accessibility, is easy to comprehend, contains good grammar, and flows in an sequence.

The important elements to consider before writing a technical document:

• Purpose – Know the purpose of the document, which serves as the direction, the reference, and the path of your details. This purpose sets the tone, the style, and structure of your document. Defining your purpose sets the things right at the very beginning. You must know if the purpose is to inform, resolve issues, and so on.
• Audience – Know your audience, which is a significant step to make an impact on them through the document. Before you start the documentation, ensure that you understand the target audience. The audience profile typically includes the technical competency of the audience, user's accessibility and understanding level of the product, new user or an existing user, and so on.
• Language – Know your audience language. For example, American English or British English.
• Format – Know how the document must be published and how is it made available for the audience.

Follow the below mentioned approaches to create effective documents:

Process and Methodology

Choose a process and methodology suitable for the project keeping in the mind the product's SDLC. One of such popular methodologies is the Agile methodology. Most of the products are delivered per this methodology and the same process is being implemented for documentation. This process includes two or three week sprints during which a unit of the product along with the documentation is completed. During this phase, the following documentation tasks are accomplished:

§ Analysis
§ Authoring
§ Review
§ QA
§ Publication

Tools

You can select content management and edit tools that are suitable for your project. This selection is based on the publication format and ease of content editing. 

Quality Practices

You must ensure the content structure, grammar, readability, and accessibility of the content. You can use the following sample practices to improve the appearance of the documents.

White spaces: 

Everyone prefer reading a technical document that is visually appealing rather than one that is cluttered with dense copy and has little or no white spaces. Simply put, white space is blank space on the paper. It can be used for various techniques as well as an easy way to enhance your document's appearance. 

White spaces can be used to achieve the following results:

• Frame the content
• Separate ideas
• Define sections of your document
• Provide relief from copy
• Highlight information

Emphasis Techniques:

• Typographical – Modifying the format of the font as italics, bold, capital letters, and so on
• Graphical – Using graphical techniques such as framing, shading, and coloring
• Spatial – Using spatial techniques such as use of white space and consistent placement of information
• Verbal cues – Using verbal cues by using the terms such as Important, Caution, Warning, and so on