Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

Parts of this are excellent. I teach a contract-drafting course for 2L and 3L law students. Some aren't good writers. When I mark up their work, I can provide them with links to specific points in the RH guide.

Some parts aren't so great. Example:

> EXAMPLE[:] Remote users can connect to network resources simply by authenticating to their local machine. IMPROVEMENT[:] Remote users can connect to network resources by authenticating to their local machine.

It's not at all obvious that you improve the sentence by omitting "simply." You lose some compressed information: in this case, an implication that alternatives to local authentication might be more complex. This implication might be significant, to some readers and certainly to the writer.

In my experience, technical people tend to tag way too many topics with “simply”. It is usually best to get rid of the word.

Fair.

I agree. It usually seems simple to the author but it's bloody annoying when some documentations says something is simple and it actually isn't.

Fair. Context matters.