One of the perks about being a blogger is that authors occasionally send me their books to review. Recently Anne Gentle sent me her new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. Anne’s book is particularly important because it addresses the situation of the technical writer today, with the web in the state it is — user generated, filled with blogs, wikis, Twitter, … more »

I’m currently reading Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds, a new book by Jean-luc Doumont. The reason I wanted to read the book is for Jean-luc’s expertise in visual design and page layout, because I thought it could help me design better quick reference guides. Although very little of the book deals with design and is more geared toward engineers (the “rational … more »

Lately I’ve been reading Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin: Selling Ideas and Solving Problems Through Pictures. In the book, Roam asserts that drawing pictures can help you solve problems. It’s a simple but profound assertion. You’re no doubt familiar with the same assertion with writing. Writing is a tool for thinking, a method for unlocking ideas. Writing about something helps you think about … more »

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success challenges assumptions about innate genius and natural-born talent. Through a series of detailed examples, Gladwell explains away these gifts by attributing them to practice, timing, circumstance, upbringing, culture, and opportunity. In other words, those really smart, successful people we admire—Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles—weren’t born with natural talent. Instead, they had the right upbringing, were in the right … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As) Length: 35 min. Richard Hamilton is the author of Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation. His book, published in 2009, is one of the few books written specifically for managers that addresses the diversity of issues that managers face today – everything from hiring … more »

The following is a guest post by Ben Minson, one of my technical writing colleagues. Ben’s blog, which also focuses on technical communication, is called Gryphon Mountain Journals. Check it out. (You can subscribe to his RSS feed here.) My wife recently bought a book for me entitled Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers. Blogging has been around for about ten … more »

We’re taught to stop and think carefully before making an important decision. But in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell finds that in complex situations, our initial two-second judgments are often more accurate than judgments derived from lengthy, painstaking analyses. Although Gladwell is careful to explore situations where two-second judgments fail, the most interesting scenarios are where rapid cognition succeeds. It contradicts reason to think that a two-second … more »