I'd Rather Be Writing

One of the challenges with wikis (or at least with Mediawiki) is figuring out how to title pages that all belong to the same product or group. I spent a bit of time researching best practices with this and didn’t come up with a clear answer. I tried to also figure out why I’d never come across this page titling conundrum before. Here’s the problem. … more »

The following is a guest post by Mick Davidson, a technical writer with 20 years of professional writing experience. Before I get started I’d like to thank Tom for giving me this opportunity to bang on about why I think wikis are the future for technical documentation. Like many writers, up to a few years ago I was plodding around using backwoods technology, stuck with … more »

The following is a guest post by Akshay Bardia, a technical writer in Mumbai, India. Technical communicators work odd hours of the day as we cater to clients in different parts of the world. So, you could find yourself yawning on the Tokyo shift, worrying about the traffic on the way back in the normal shift, or dozing off during the West coast shift. If … more »

The following is a guest post by Lopa Mishra, a technical writer in Mumbai, India. At a college reunion party recently, someone asked me what job I’m pursuing. On replying that I’m a writer, a friend jumped in to clarify that I’m a “technical” writer. My friend considers that technical writing has nothing to do with creativity, contrary to “plain” writing which is a highly … more »

In my writing role at work , I occasionally post updates on behalf of our IT organization to various social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, our blog, and a user forum. Most of my activity on these social media channels is sparse and sporadic — a few minutes on an occasional hour. However, lately I’ve felt that we aren’t tapping into social … more »

In 2004, when I returned from a teaching stint in Egypt and began working as a copywriter for a health company in Clearwater, Florida, my manager insisted that I track something related to my writing. We decided that I would track word count, because this was the easiest thing to track. Each week, I graphed the number of words I published, and during a weekly … more »

I’m attending three conferences this year: Confab, the STC Summit, and Lavacon.  Why did I pick these conferences, over others? I attended Confab’s inaugural conference last year and felt it was a good fit for my web publishing role at work. Although my job title is “senior technical writer,” I spend about 60% of my time being a web editor for LDSTech. LDSTech has a blog, wiki, … more »

The following is a guest post by Sarah Maddox, a technical writer at Atlassian. In a recent conversation, Tom mentioned that he’s been pondering this question: “Why, in a time when collaboration is more important than ever, do wikis still remain mostly unused as a help authoring tool in tech comm departments?” Tom asked me to join his ponderings and write a guest post on … more »

I was completely incensed to read Yahoo’s categorization of technical writing as the #1 laid-back career. In 5 Low-Stress Career Options, the writer makes the ridiculous claim that technical writing isn’t just a low-stress job, but is apparently the #1 lowest-stress job of any career in America! Laid-back Career #1: Technical Writer Technical writers often write articles, manuals, and instruction booklets on a variety of topics, including … more »

I just got back from a 4 mile jog up and down the night sidewalks of my city. I’m not much of a jogger, but after a day of sledding, parenting, traveling, cooking, and changing baby diapers, I needed to get out for an hour on my own. It’s relatively cold in Utah at night. About 34 degrees right now, so I wear a balaclava … more »

A while ago I tweeted about how poor I am with email. I’ve tried various methods. I tried automatically filtering all the non-essential email into subfolders, but as some commenters pointed out, I soon never checked these subfolders. I tried unsubscribing from everything, but this seemed an impossible task. Then Will Sansbury recommended that I try The Email Game, and I actually love it. The Email Game … more »

A couple of weeks ago I gave an STC webinar called Designing Quick Reference Guides. This was a general STC webinar, and usually I am not allowed to repost the recording, but due to some audio difficulties, I had to re-record it, and the STC gave me permission to post the re-recording. Here are the files to watch or download the webinar: Webinar recording | … more »

I recently gave a presentation to the Southwestern Ontario STC chapter called Organizing Help Content: Breaking Out of Topic-Based Hierarchies.  Here’s a recording of the presentation: Webinar recording Slides only Audio only

After my last post about being an individual contributor, a reader asked if I had heard of the Peter Principle or Parkinson’s Laws. I hadn’t, so I read about them on Wikipedia, as well as a related principle, the Dilbert Principle. The Peter Principle The Peter Principle states that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” In other words, … more »

For someone who has the job of “technical writer,” I spend very little time writing. It amazes me how quickly the day fills up with non-writing tasks. Meetings, reports, issues — they seem to surface again and again at work, requiring my attention. I sometimes try timing myself and find that if I can get in three hours of writing during the day, that’s good. … more »