A career in technical writing is a sedentary, almost motionless desk job. The greater endurance you have to sit still and keep your hands on the keyboard or mouse pad, the more productive you’ll be. I am starting to miss working with my hands, and walking around. During the past few weeks, the “Mr-Fix-It” section Continue Reading »
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100 Rejected Summit Proposals
The call for STC Summit proposals is now open. Below are 100 Summit ridiculous proposals that were rejected in the past. They may be helpful as you prepare your own submission. 100 Mistakes I Made During My First Hour as a Technical Writer Technical Writer Versus Technical Communicator Versus Technical Author: Who Are We? Who Continue Reading »
Best Practices for Writing Interface Text [Organizing Content #24]
In this ongoing series on organizing content, we’ve shifted from organizing help outside the interface to organizing help inside the interface. Moving help inside the interface has many advantages, and there are plenty of best practices for style and format. But the biggest shift in perspective, which I argued in my last post, is to Continue Reading »
The Interface Is Text [Organizing Content #23]
In my last post, The Technical Writer as an Outsider, I argued that being an outsider to a project gives you a valuable perspective about the gaps, problems, inconsistencies, and other issues in an interface, so you can do a better job documenting it for other outsiders. After writing the post, I tried to embrace Continue Reading »
The Technical Writer as an Outsider: How Ambitious Are You? [Organizing Content #22]
After our recent reorg, our tech writing group, now split up, has been wondering about the best way to realign ourselves in the new reporting structure, which has yet to be fully defined. Will we end up at the bottom, relegated into some lonely, forgotten corner of the org chart? Will we be grouped with Continue Reading »
Editorial Strategies and Mind Games
This week, after Mindtouch released its top 25 elite blogger list, most of the tech comm blogosphere was taking bows and saying congratulations and writing posts that began I’m-so-honored and wow-what-can-I-say. These posts started to make me feel a little ill, because I suppose I enjoy reading more about suffering than success, but that’s beside Continue Reading »
Introduction to WordPress — Recording of WordPress Webinar
Last month I gave a webinar on WordPress to the STC CIC SIG, which is the Independent Contracting and Consulting Special Interest Group of the Society for Technical Communication. I recorded the webinar and am allowed now to make it available for free on my site. The recording plays my voice only, and the whole Continue Reading »
Principles for Organizing Print Material [Organizing Content #21]
For years I prided myself on single-sourcing both online help and printed guides. When I used RoboHelp, I created custom macros in Word to clean up and adjust the print formatting. With Madcap Flare, I hammered out the print styles until everything looked clean. And then I made a major mistake: I more or less Continue Reading »
Relying on the Wisdom of the Crowds with Help Authoring [Organizing Content #20]
The most compelling idea from emergence, which I explained in my previous post, is the surprising wisdom of the crowd. The guesses of 800 people about the weight of an ox at the county fair averaged out to be just one pound from the actual ox’s weight. The wisdom-of-the-crowds idea is revolutionary. Traditionally “the masses” Continue Reading »
Emergence [Organizing Content #19]
In the ongoing series on organizing content, we now shift attention to the phenomenon of emergence, and how intelligent, sophisticated systems emerge from relatively simple, unsophisticated parts. I listened to a Radiolab podcast the other day that explored this topic in depth. The hosts related how in the 1800s, Francis Galton visited a county fair Continue Reading »