If you're considering entering a tech comm program to transition into technical writing, keep in mind two considerations — the emphasis on technical skills, and the potential drift from corporate relevance.
When we see risk-taking and idealism in younger people, it's hard to avoid adopting a more cynical attitude born from our own learned experience. And yet, encouraging youth to avoid risk-taking and follow a safer route also diminishes the chances of their success.
XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) provides a DITA-based CCMS for both technical documentation and digital asset management. Palo Alto Networks used AEM to build a world-class documentation portal. A driving factor in their adoption was the ability to integrate documentation and marketing content.
A recent study looked at how developers interact with API documentation. It found a mix of systematic and opportunistic learning styles. While we often write with the former in mind, focusing on the latter styles (opportunistic) might be more beneficial, and will cause us to focus on improving search, navigation, interactive components, troubleshooting, error messages, and other action-oriented features.
The engineering demographic can make even a relatively young person seem old. This sense of growing old is causing panic in many tech workers in Silicon Valley. One solution might be to change your mindset about what it means to be young, and to learn to unlearn what you have already internalized unconsciously.
In episode 20, Matt Reiner from K15t joins us to talk about minimum standards for documentation -- what techniques or standards can you put in place to help engineers and other contributors meet the minimum requirement for good tech docs? What essential sections, headings, or topics should you include in templates? And how do you help non-native speakers with grammar issues? We also discuss how tech writers can work with marketing to create honest and interesting writing. There seems to be the feeling that tech writing is dull but accurate and marketing copy is flashy and fluffy -- we brainstorm ways technical writers can better align with marketing writers.
Corporations often expect tech comm academics to fashion their curriculums to suit corporate needs; in contrast, academic departments want to give students a safe space free of corporate agendas for critical inquiry. Tech comm academics are often caught between these two groups and must satisfy both.
This week I traveled to Louisiana to attend the Symposium for Communicating Complex Information and presented on tech comm trends. You can listen to the recording, view my slides, and read my latest thoughts on trends here.
In the workplace, why aren't technical writers recognized as SMEs with the same credibility and respect as engineering SMEs? Why do PMs and others often override the judgment of technical writers on matters of language and docs? This post explores the challenges that technical writers experience as SMEs in the workplace, and strategies they can implement for asserting their expertise. The format is a Q&A with authors of a CDQ article, with a survey at the end.
How do you become a 10X technical writer in the workplace (10X means 10 times more efficient and productive than others)? In this post, I raise the question and then offer a few tips I try to follow: (1) Record your meetings with engineers, (2) Respond quickly to emails and messages, (3) Iterate on content with ever-expanding layers of reviewers, (4) Put some work back on those who request it, and (5) Learn to say no so you can focus on fewer projects with deeper engagement.
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Jessica Parsons, a documentation engineer from Netlify, joins us for Episode 19 of the WTD Podcast. Jess recently conducted a Static Site Generator workshop at the Australian Write the Docs conference at Melbourne. In this episode, Jess illuminates the world of static site generators, comparing and contrasting Hugo, Jekyll, Sphinx, Gatsby, and others.
Yesterday I gave a presentation called Tech Comm Trends: Providing Value as a Generalist in a Sea of Specialists on The Content Wrangler BrightTALK channel. The recording is embedded below.
Every year, when I re-examine my site analytics, I take the time to reflect on trends I’m seeing with traffic to my own site. Not necessarily industry trends, just trends about which topics are popular on my site. Based on these trends, I assess and re-evaluate some of my directions. This year, I found that the increase in traffic on my API documentation site (which accounts for 59% of my overall site traffic) suggests that more engineers are writing docs. This confirms my earlier predictions at the beginning of 2018 that specialization will drive more engineers to write API documentation, with technical writers playing more supporting editorial and publishing roles.
The 2017-2018 STC Salary Database was recently released, and the employment and salary levels for technical writers are looking really good — especially for some areas. 'San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara' (a Metropolitan Statistical Area or MSA) had a 34.5% increase in tech writer employment for 2017 and continued to be the highest-paying MSA for the fifth straight year in a row. In this post, I'll share a few highlights from the report.
