I received the following question from a reader: I’m a 20 year old college student and I just finished up my first year at a local community college and I was wondering what my major should be if I want to become a technical writer when I eventually graduate. Right now my counselors have me majoring in General Science (b/c my dream job would be … more »

This week, as I was riding my bike to work and listening to Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World (a classic fantasy/adventure book), one of the characters — was it Bayle Domon, the pirate? for the life of me, I can’t remember, nor can I find it, but he says something like this to Rand, one of the protagonists: Sometimes … more »

In my last post, I argued that rhetoric is the foundation of communication. Rhetoric is the practice of fitting the message to the context to get the results you want. In the most common scenario for technical writers and instructional designers, the rhetorical context is a learning situation. You want the user to learn new software or hardware. What’s the best way to organize content … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 12 min. In this podcast (another monologue), I respond to more student questions about technical writing. The questions are as follows: Question 1 – Who/what are the people and purposes that you write for now? And in the past? Question 2 – What are the kinds of things that you write? Question 3 – What … more »

In this interview, I ask Rich Maggiani, who serves on the STC board, to comment on why questions are so important and what the art of questioning entails. Rich gave a presentation at the Summit titled The Art of Questioning.

The other week Jane and I met with our daughter’s teacher for a regular parent-teacher conference. Sally is in third grade but reads books beyond her level. She’s read the entire Harry Potter series. She raced through the Percy Jackson books, and will read about anything with a horse in it. The last Jazz game I took Sally to, we stopped off at Barnes and … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 30 min. This is a special podcast for Carly Finseth at Clemson University who is thinking about entering the field of technical writing and wanted to ask me a few questions. After I recorded the podcast, she was kind enough to transcribe it. I polished up the transcription a bit so that it would be … more »

Last night, unable to sleep at about 4 a.m., either because I went to bed early or because I simply couldn’t sleep, I grabbed my BlackBerry, on its usual place on my nightstand, and began to read through my email and feeds, as I am accustomed to do, lying half-conscious on my pillow, when I saw this intriguing question from Harold Motley about whether the … more »