Every time you write more than two paragraphs of text to explain something technical, consider whether a diagram could be a better way to communicate the idea.

It is annoying to have to switch away from your document/email editor and fire up a drawing tool, but a diagram has many advantages:

  • It makes you think clearly about what you are trying to communicate
  • It allows you to use colour and space to separate different concepts
  • People will actually look at a diagram where they would just skim over a dense block of text
  • Many engineers think visually
  • People who are dyslexic or not working in their native language may struggle to parse long pieces of text

Sometimes a short textual explanation is needed alongside a diagram, but this should add information rather than just repeating what is shown in the diagram.

If you are writing a document that may be edited in future, try to attach the source file of the diagram somehow so that the diagram can be updated too.