Limit the scope of information

There's a simple sign of bad documentation in software—you cannot find specific information in it, even if you're sure that it is there. After spending some time reading the table of contents, you are starting to search through text files using grep with several word combinations and still cannot find what you are looking for. But you're sure the information is there because you saw it once.

This often happens when writers do not organize their texts well with meaningful titles and headings. They might provide tons of information, but it won't be useful if the reader is not able to scan through all the documentation for a specific topic.

In a good document, paragraphs should be gathered under a meaningful heading for a given section, and the document title should synthesize the content in a short phrase. A table of contents could be made of all the sections' titles, in order to help the reader scan through the document.

A simple yet effective practice to compose your titles and headings is to ask yourself, "What phrase would I type in Google to find this section?"