How much documentation do you need?

How much documentation should you do? When you’re looking for something, why is it always in the last place you look?

Because you stop looking.

How much documentation do you have to write?  Just enough to be understood. And no more.

That is a simplistic statement of course.  It’s hard to know when you’re understood, unlike finding your keys. Being understood is not black and white. And this when you are talking to someone and they can tell you they do not understand or give you that blank look.  When you are writing and you get no feedback you cannot tell at all.  Even though or perhaps because I think of myself as a professional writer, I can guarantee you that if you rely on written documentation alone, you will write both too little and too much to be understood. To the degree needed. By anyone. 

Writing is hard.  You get that.

Reading is hard.  Nobody gets that. Unless we do not understand at all, we all tend to think reading is easy. I am studying Portuguese. I am at the point that when I read a sentence there are some words I ‘know’ the meaning of. But a word in one language is not a matter of subsituting the word, one for one, with another.  And the sentence structures are different.  The nuances, shadings of meaning and intend and allusion are different. It feels like looking through water or fog. And I realize that this is true not just for foreign languages, but for all forms of communication.