Management of over enthusiastic infodump over chat!
Infodumping is when you provide a whole lot of information all at once. It's a term that's been used for some decades when critiquing literature and has been adopted by autistic communities to refer to our tendencies to excitedly enthuse on a topic.
Documentarians (aka technical writers, content champions and word nerds) are prone to this trait. In some ways technical writing is an ongoing wrestling match with infodumping as we take on vast amounts of information, process and subject matter expertise and transform it into content that can be used and understood with greater ease.
In an increasingly remote world, our non-technical writing colleagues can find our facility for writing things down a little bit overwhelming. It can be especially frustrating for technical writing when even asking questions can trigger overwhelm in others as it floods their brain with new angles and questions. We can feel stuck in a bind where we're simultaneously told to ask questions, but also please don't communicate so much!
This is why when I was putting together the Neurodivergent Quality of Life Prioritization Matrix management of over enthusiastic infodump over chat was one of the first criteria I listed.
In this blog post I share some tips and tricks I find helpful, as well as some advice from fellow Write the Docs peers. We'll never get it perfect, but perfect is never the point.
