Search results

New Site Policy About How I Respond to Questions

by Tom Johnson on Jul 27, 2008
categories: blogging technical-writing

I get a lot of questions from readers who stumble upon my blog while searching for answers to various things. I don't mind getting questions, but a lot of times I don't have good answers. I've decided to add a new question policy to my Contact page. The policy is as follows:

Note: If you ask me a question, I may choose to excerpt your question and post the response on my blog. When I do this, I'll always protect your identity with a fictional name. If you don't want me to respond to your question in a blog post, let me know. Posting responses via blog posts gives you a much larger audience to potentially respond to your question.

Most people are agreeable to this anyway, as long as I hide their identity. By posting the policy note before people submit questions, I can decrease the turnaround time, because I won't have to first reply with a request to post the response in a blog post.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the tech comm, be sure to subscribe to email updates below. You can also learn more about me or contact me. Finally, note that the opinions I express on my blog are my own points of view, not that of my employer.