I received the following question from a reader: I have semi-transitioned to a new position at my job where I’m responsible for creating and maintaining documentation for our systems, programs, policies, etc. I was selected for the position because I have written many tutorials for our applications to be read by new employees. Since I have no formal education in writing (I love to write, … more »

In this video, I talk with Richard Hamilton, founder of XML Press, an imprint focused on technical communication, to share details about the upcoming books he is publishing. Richard also comments on how he identifies topics and trends for the technical communication publishing market.

As I implemented the Organize Series plugin for my long essay about moving From Overlooked to Center Stage, an interesting idea dawned on me: The Long Tail applies to writing as well. The Long Tail is an economic principle claiming that an abundance of little sales of niche products eventually outproduce the mega sales of mainstream products. For example, Amazon.com may not sell many 1970 … more »

At the Intermountain STC workshop this morning, we talked about how to build an online presence. During my portion of the workshop, I facilitated a discussion using Twitter. With the dozen participants, all sitting in front of computers with Internet access, I told them to go to Search.Twitter.com and search for the #imstc hashtag. I posed a question for them to answer via Twitter. They … more »

How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing. I saw this on Gordon Meyer’s blog. It talks about how blogs and web publishing have provided venues for texts that, due to incorrect page length, wouldn’t have otherwise been published. Traditionally, texts had to be either 5 pages for magazines or 200 pages for books. Blogs now allow paragraph-length thoughts or 20 pages essays. Length … more »

Great Books by Writers Who Aren’t Dead Yet My friend Josh just started this site. He’s an English professor at BYU Idaho. It’s an online book club involving discussion of excellent literary authors still alive.

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Everyone knows it’s a good practice to chunk your help material into discrete topics, but how granular should you chunk it? Take a look at this Microsoft Word 2007 help topic on inserting headers and footers. Although inserting headers and footers is the main task, the topic really has 11 related tasks: Insert the same header or footer on each page Make the first page … more »