Turn off and tune out

All good non-fiction writing shares certain characteristics: consistent economy, upbeat pace and digestible ideas that logically flow. Tech writers have an additional challenge, however, of combining all this with boring technical detail. How to explain the mechanical stuff without being either too dry or too simple? What’s the reader’s likely level of knowledge?

These questions can eat an author up. I imagine science writers have the same difficulty, but this problem weighs especially on tech writers, because the composition of a piece of software, an encryption standard, or a machine-learning algorithm has a direct bearing on how it works and therefore how it affects the world. You can’t really understand the social or economic impact of bitcoin, for example, without understanding — to a reasonable degree — how the thing works. It is essential, therefore, that books about technology make sense to the non-specialist without scrimping on detail. (If you don’t think this is a problem, go online now and google the word ‘blockchain’.)