Today I spent a rather lonely day writing documentation. I had one team meeting, during which our team gathered for what seemed like a brief second. We then departed back to our respective portfolios, most of us working alone and in solitude toward some distant documentation goal.

Lately I have been logging a lot of bugs in JIRA, our bug-tracking database. In one day I logged 25 bugs. This past week I logged about 60 overall. It feels good to log bugs. I feel like I’m finding valuable gaps in the application where code simply isn’t working. Despite these benefits to the project team, in a recent triage meeting with the lead … more »

Fortune cookies with fortunes rewritten as numbered lists. Bobblehead with favorite SME’s face pasted on the front. Stack of how-to manuals from everything you assembled for Christmas. Copy of that House episode with the agoraphobe tech writer and comment “Saw this and thought of you.” * “Certificate” of year’s achievements with typos on it. * Jigsaw puzzle of the current interface the tech writer is … more »

Why we need technical communicators « Don’t Call Me Tina.

You know the typical scenario — the technical writer is the last one to be notified of changes to the application (be it interface or functionality), and developers hate reviewing the manuals we write. Recently a business analyst explained an interesting technique to me for not only discovering software changes, but also building rapport with developers. He said that in a previous company, he bought … more »

I published an article in TechCraft last week called “Should You Sit Near SMEs?” TechCraft is the eNewsletter that accompanies the Technical Writers of India (TWI) mailing list. If you already have a Yahoo ID, here’s the link to the article — scroll down to the September 2007 PDF copy. It’s in the “Legally Bland” section. (I’m still not sure what this section title could … more »

A listener to the Tech Writer Voices podcast suggested I do a podcast on the following: Give ideas to people who are just starting out in technical writing. What is the base of knowledge that every technical writer should have? And so in preparation for the podcast, I offer these five skills or characteristics as absolute musts for the technical writer:

Sports doesn’t always parallel life, but here’s one that’s relevant for the season. Although penalties in football are usually looked upon as costly mistakes, they can actually be a good thing — they demonstrate aggressiveness. Holding back your players into a passive, milquetoast attitude can be worse than racking up a half a dozen penalties. Aggressiveness also happens to be an important quality for technical … more »

Sometimes I would like to change my job title from “technical writer” to investigative reporter, because so often this is the task that we have. Information we need is not online, not in any documents, not even available in the application itself. We have to pry it from the minds of subject matter experts (SMEs), the techies who talk in acronyms and dream in code. … more »