I'd Rather Be Writing » social media

Graduate Research Findings about Technical Communication and Blogs in the Workplace

Tom Johnson — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:07:30 +0000

The following is a guest post by Michelle Tompkins. Earlier this year she asked me to post a survey about technical communication and blogging. I posted it here, and then asked if she would follow up to share her findings. This guest post shares her findings.

Earlier in December, Tom Johnson was nice enough to help me with my graduate research on how blogs are used with the workplace of a technical communicator. I received great feedback from all of the respondents on my survey, and I would like to thank everyone who participated.

Not only did my study look at blog use, but also how social media tools are changing the nature of work for technical communicators. As social media continues to change the way we write and communicate with audiences, it is important to understand the functions, uses, and impacts of these technologies on our work as technical communicators. My short survey helped determine if and how blogs are being used as a professional tool within our field.

After collecting and analyzing the data from my survey, I found that approximately 88 percent of respondents use social media tools at work. When respondents were asked specifically about the type of social media tools used, wikis, social networking sites, and micro-blogging technologies such as Twitter were the most popular.

However, only 69 percent reported using blogs as part of their work. The most common uses of blogs within the workplace were sharing internal company news, communicating with external stakeholders, reviewing products and services, and knowledge management and sharing.

Another common use of blogs by technical communicators was professional development. Many respondents reported blogs as a replacement for the company newsletter, which has created a more dynamic forum for internal information dissemination.

While the focus of my research was specifically on the use of blogs, I was also interested in learning more about how social media tools have affected the nature of our daily work. Surprisingly, only 55 percent of respondents felt that social media tools have had a significant impact their daily work.

Some technical communicators felt that social media tools have opened a new channel of communication, which allows instant feedback from internal and external stakeholders. Another impact of social media tools reported was a more efficient way to store, organize, and share information.

Through my survey and other research endeavors, I believe the most significant impact of social media tools on our field as a whole has been the ability to have a direct connection or conversation with our users, customers, and document audiences. This direct connection with the end user will enable technical communicators to develop deliverables that are more accessible and usable for their specificied audiences.

With all of this said, I believe that social media tools have had a significant impact on the field of technical communication. However, I do not believe that it is inevitable that all technical communicators will embrace these technologies. Not all of technical communication jobs will change, but as evident from my research, a large portion of job descriptions may change as a result of the daily emergence of new technologies.

The most important aspect that I have taken from my research is that blogs and social media cannot be ignored. Even if technical communicators are not using the tools themselves, their users, audiences, and customers are, which forces us as technical communicators to at least be cognizant of these new tools of communication.

Once again, thank you to all who participated in my survey. If you have any further questions about my research, you can reach me at MET7189@gmail.com.

Michelle is a graduate student studying technical communication at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. You can follow her blog at http://mshelltompkins.wordpress.com.

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Introducing Technical Writing World, a New Social Network for Technical Writers

Tom Johnson — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:42:38 +0000

Arnold Burian, founder of the new social network TechnicalWritingWorld.com

The following is a guest post by Arnold Burian, founder of the new social network Technical Writing World.

When it comes to knowledge sharing, we technical writers have it pretty darn good. There are active mailing lists (HATT, TECHRL-W), many informative blogs (I’d Rather Be Writing, The Content Wrangler), a vibrant notification system (#techcomm on Twitter), and professional organizations (STC, TWIN) rich with content.

We have thought leaders like Tom Johnson, Craig Haiss, Gordon Meyer, Sarah Maddox, Aaron Davis, Scott Nesbitt, RJ Jacqez, Gordon McLean, Ugur Akinci, Scott Abel, Ivan Walsh, and many more. If you are dedicated to the craft of technical communication, you have access to an endless supply of resources.

After consuming so much from so many, I wanted to give something back – to share the little knowledge I learned with others. This was my motivation to start a blog, where I began to collect my thoughts and share them. While posting, I came to realize that I was much more interested in the dialog between visitors than in my own posts. This ultimately led to Technical Writing World, a social networking site.

So, what do I want Technical Writing World to be? I want TWW to be useful. And I want it to complement the many resources already available to us. I also know what I do not want it to be. I do not want to compete with HATT or TECHRL-W. I do not want to be an organization, group, or club. I do not want TWW to have an agenda or divide the community. And I also do not want to restrict what it can become.

There are many online articles about what it takes to build a successful community, but I have some of my own ideas for TWW:

Be inclusive. Everyone is welcome. Absolutely no criteria, real or imagined or financial, will prevent you from joining. Years and years of experience? Welcome. A technical writing student? Welcome. Thinking of becoming a technical writer? Welcome. Struggling? Welcome. Eventually, I would like to see TWW expand to “technical writers and our friends” (translators, editors, information architects, etc). For now, I feel a tighter focus will help the site grow initially. But friends are welcome today and always will be welcome.
Be convenient. Make everything available in the fewest clicks possible. Wherever we can, offer it in a single click. Log in – single click. Start a discussion topic – single click. Start a blog post – single click. Make “the site” fade away, leaving just people and social moments. The less time you spend navigating, the more time you can spend participating.
Be dynamic. Listen to the community. Be cognizant and responsive to how the community wants to grow, and adapt TWW to keep pace. Never lose touch with the heart of the community, and let the will of the people steer it.
Be transparent. Don’t hide anything. Put the site on display. Drive by surfers may spot an interesting topic, stop, read, and perhaps learn something. Offer an inviting environment in the hopes that they pause long enough to want to stay a while.
Be patient. Communities do not magically appear overnight. Be in this for the long haul. Build something interesting for the community, and then let the community decide over time that it wants to (hopefully) embrace it.
Be complete. Offer the full social networking experience. Facebook. Twitter. Friend lists. Forums. Blogs. Events. Status updates. Profile pages. Activity feeds. Offer everything and the kitchen sink, in a system that is familiar to the social networking community.
Don’t be so serious. If you put a bunch of technical writers in a room together, conversations will wander and topics will stray. I want TWW to capture that element. We should try to straddle the line between focused, relevant topics and those that make us social human beings. In many ways, the #techcomm community on Twitter has done this – informative links intermingling with ones that make you laugh or smile. If we can build upon this, I will consider TWW a success.

So with this, the journey begins. I hope you will join us for at least a few steps…and then decide to stay a while.

Arnold Burian spent a decade as a team lead writing hardware documentation for the telecommunications industry, and the last seven years as a documentation manager for a global software company. He has an undergraduate degree in computer science and a graduate degree in technical communication and information design from the Illinois Institute of Technology. After graduating, he taught graduate and undergraduate classes in technical communication. See more information about Arnold

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Participatory Economics: Are Companies Budgeting for Social Media?

Tom Johnson — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:15:50 +0000

A podcast summary by David Armano from Edelman caught my attention yesterday. Armano writes:

My theory is that social technologies and the online behaviors they enable leads to more participation from what use to be static audiences and “consumers”. But as a result of this, a demand is generated for participation to be reciprocated from business and brands. If this is true (and I think the needle is moving in that direction) does big business have the supply to meet the demand of participation? (Logic+Emotion: Participatory Economics: The Supply + Demand of Participation.)

In other words, businesses may step into social media to align with web trends. After all, if you don’t have a blog, a Facebook presence, a Twitter account, a forum, and other social media tools, you’re behind the times. But just having a Facebook page or a WordPress blog URL or Twitter ID doesn’t ensure that you also have presence and participation. Participating in social media requires a resource effort that many businesses haven’t budgeted for.

This post rang true because last week I scrambled to keep up with forum posts and other feedback from users after the release of a calendar application. In our release, we included a Submit Feedback link to gather the feedback. Similarly, we have a forum where more tech-savvy users post and exchange information. In the past two weeks, we’ve had about 425 emails and 40 forum responses.

I’m not sure who’s supposed to respond to all this feedback, because no one factored it into the project plan. Users grow frustrated when no one responds to them, but to respond to the barrage of feedback would require a full-time job. I sometimes scan the feedback for topics to add to the help, but we need someone hired as a social media/support specialist to respond individually to their questions and feedback.

I don’t think dedicating full time resources to social media is on anyone’s mind. Most businesses don’t understand the time required to engage in social media. In the past, perhaps users didn’t expect it. But now, if users submit feedback to a business, or post in a forum about a company’s product, they expect a response.

Ideally, businesses will hire a new force of employees to engage and interact in social media. But in my world, social media is a layer of optional participation on top of your regular job. I’m not even talking about raw content creation for social media channels, such as writing blog posts. I’m just referring to responses and basic participation in forums and threads.

The unfortunate reality is that because businesses aren’t immersed in social media channels, they probably won’t even realize the need.

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Podcast: Finding and Creating Relevant Content — Strategies for Social Media

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:21:18 +0000

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Length: 70 min.

In the barrage of information created by all the social media channels, how can you find relevant content? How can you move past forms of noise to actually produce content that engages users? What forms of social media do students respond to the most? These are some of the questions we explored in a presentation I gave to Brigham Young University Provo students earlier this week. This podcast is a recording of the presentation.

The podcast is about an hour long, and I bookended the presentation with some thoughts before and after.

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New Variables for Technical Writing Project Managers: Larry Kunz at the STC Summit in Dallas, #stc10

Tom Johnson — Mon, 10 May 2010 03:47:37 +0000

In this video, I interview Larry Kunz about new variables for technical writing project managers. Larry talks specifically about the ways agile and social media are changing the way technical writers manage projects. We recorded this video at the STC Summit in Dallas. The next day, Larry received the President’s Award at the STC Summit for his work with strategic planning. (I didn’t know it at the time we recorded the video, or I would have asked him about it.)

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From Overlooked to Center Stage [6]

Tom Johnson — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 06:11:28 +0000

Catalyst 2: User Experience

We didn’t have a very good support model for the application. It became clear that our service desk, which included mostly BYU students working part-time and supporting over 100 different applications, couldn’t answer questions that users had. They would only escalate the questions to us. And not many of our customers trusted the support desk anyway. Eventually the project manager started forwarding customer questions to me. I became the go-to person to support the application.

At first I resisted this, because after all, I wasn’t a support desk agent. It was a little demeaning. Customer Support had always been a separate department in other places I worked. But I figured that since I could update the help on the fly, I would just either point users to answers in the help or add to the help until the help was complete and answered every possible question users could have. It would give me good feedback about questions users would have, so that I could write better help.

But as I started talking more and more with the customers, and even observing them in the computer classrooms where I also gave training, a funny thing started to happen. I started to see how users actually used the application. In my training sessions, I would give them a list of tasks to perform, and then I would watch them. It wasn’t so much training as a massive usability lab. I would see users try to click certain buttons because of the interface text, and I would see them go to the wrong screens. I would ask them to explain why they did something. They provided abundant feedback.

Suddenly when we gathered together in project meetings, I was no longer the guy who was just writing the help files. I had tapped into the user experience in a way that the interaction designers hadn’t. I knew how the users thought, how they acted. My close personal interactions with them allowed me to understand users better than anyone else on the entire project team. I even started to offer a few training sessions with the real intent of measuring usability. I would give a 15 minute overview to users on how to use the application, and then give then 10-20 tasks to perform. I just moved about the room watching users try to complete the tasks.

Because of this user knowledge, I became a key player in decisions about design. I was often included with the other core leaders on the team — the quality assurance lead, the project manager, the interaction designer — in key decision-making meetings about the application. When the interaction designer would present an application screen, I would look at it and say, users don’t understand that term. Users are getting lost here. Users keep clicking this button and thinking that it sends the item there, when in fact it sends it here. Users have a different workflow and process for this, and so on.

The project manager had a motto of NIHITO, meaning nothing important happens in the office, and so he often accompanied me in the classroom training where he could interact with the users as well. After a session where he could look over the shoulders of users as they moved through the application, he said the interaction designer (IxD) should definitely be there so he could see for himself how his designs were being followed. The IxD never made it to any of the sessions I led, unfortunately.

The more training and customer support I gave, the more valuable it made me on the project team. I was no longer just documenting what is. I was instead defining what should be. I became an influence in the shaping of the prototypes for future releases. And often when the project manager and the interaction designer were at loggerheads on a design, the project manager would say, let’s let Tom decide. And I would. And you know, I was usually right. It was precisely this user knowledge that gave me a seat at the design table.

I decided to continue filling the support role for the application, mainly because it gave me an incredible insight into the user experience — their pain points and problem areas, their questions, workflows, and business processes. Yes, it helped me create better help. But more than anything else, it helped me transition into a more prominent player on the team, influencing the design and product roadmap. I realized that this knowledge of our users was more important than almost anything else. Others could learn to write. Others could create diagrams. But who knew the mind of the user? I did.

Later, at a conference with Noz Urbina, I interviewed him for a podcast. Noz explained exactly what I had experienced but in the context of social media. Noz said that one consequence of managing the social media channels is that the technical communicator taps into the user feedback in a serious way:

Now the technical communicator is in essence the key holder on a pipeline in of customer data, which is essential to product development, which is essential to the business’s profitability…. So now instead of just giving the manual which goes in the box because they have to, now the tech comm has a conversation going with the client post-sale, to see where their problems are, to see how their customer experience has been with the product over time. And because that conversation is intimate about the details of the customer experience with the technology, then that becomes very valuable data.

Some technical communicators tap so fully into the user experience that they transition from their tech comm roles entirely into a usability role. Theresa Putkey, a Vancouver-based technical writer, made this transition. I spoke with her about how she did it. She said,

I was doing the technical writing. … I had been telling these [project] guys, this UI is really bad. I don’t even know how you could have thought of this. Of course I said it nicer than that. Like, this is a good first attempt, but if you really want to do it well, this is how you can do it. So when they wanted to [start another project] with requirements and usability, they didn’t have anybody to do it, and I said I’ll do it. Because that’s something I’m interested in. Since it was a small team, they said that’s great. And I got along with everybody. So that’s how I started doing the usability stuff. Started designing the UI and writing the specs for it. And then also doing the technical writing at the end.

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When Social Media Becomes Hollow

Tom Johnson — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:09:02 +0000

I attended Podcamp Salt Lake City (Podcampslc.org) on Friday for the third year in a row. The attendees have fluctuated. The first year, about 30 attended. The next year, about 90 attended. This year, the attendees decreased to around 45.

Sometimes events just suffer from poor timing. We are all so busy. But I noticed another trend: more and more sessions focused on social media, almost as much as podcasting. Here are a few of the session titles:

Client Attraction with Digital Media
Using social media to promote your content
Leveraging New / Social Media for Personal Branding
5 Killer Press Release Strategies For Your Podcasts

At one point I wondered if the social media club had infiltrated the podcasting crowd. Among the audience, it seemed everyone was genuinely interested in using social media to grow their business.

Thom Allen, the organizer of PodcampSLC, is even considering changing the name and focus of the conference to broaden the scope next year. I mentioned that we could change it to a “Social Media Camp” and include podcasting as a subtrack, fitting it into the larger trend of social media. If we changed that focus, I’m confident we would have 95+ bouncy people attending.

Many of the topics around social media included strategies for increasing your visibility and followers. One presenter laid down a social media methodology: get the reader’s attention, ask permission to interact (via a newsletter sign up), build trust with content, and then use that trust to influence decisions. It’s the same strategy Jason Van Orden teaches.

Other social media tips recommended by presenters included registering domain names in every social media space available, responding to every Facebook, Twitter, and email reply you receive from readers, and maintaining a presence in all major social media spheres, even the untrendy MySpace.

I’m not a huge social media fan, and during one IM moment with Jane, at home with the kids, she said, “I hate social media.” She says she uses Twitter because she wants to interact with her friends, not to “promote her brand.” She wants any “fame” to follow naturally from the content she produces rather than from spending 10 hours a day doing social media networking.

Me too. It’s not that I dislike Twitter or blogging or podcasting or Facebook or the infinite number of new social sites. For me, it’s the idea that social media’s only purpose is to grow your business and readership. I dislike the idea that it’s all essentially a business motive. You build trust so you can influence others and get them to follow you and subscribe to your newsletter. You engage in social media so you can increase your visibility, so people will link back to you, buy your products and services, and so you can take in more money and increase your product offerings. You engage in social media so you can expand your reach and little by little dominate the world.

When the discussion about social media revolves around this end game, I start to feel uneasy. It’s the same ill feeling I had in college when I would speak with business majors. Whereas most of us were engaged in literature or science, business majors seemed to focus only on schemes to make money. Is that how they interpret social media? As another scheme to make money?

I didn’t tweet much during the first half of Podcamp because I simply didn’t feel like it. After my presentation, I was a bit more relaxed and exhausted at the same time. My brain was numb from having stayed up too late the night before preparing my presentation and fulfilling other assignments. But after I ran into an old mission buddy at Podcamp, things started to turn around. I found a second wind and became much more alive. I started asking questions to the presenters, began posting a few tweets, and overall became more engaged.

When I post a tweet, publish a blog post, record a podcast, or engage in any other form of social media, I don’t consciously do it with the intent of growing my readership and increasing my brand or business. I don’t engage in social media for the business-motivated end game. I’m not trying to build trust with readers so that I can later influence them with product or service decisions. I’m just expressing and communicating about things I’m interested in. If the consequence is that people follow me and we interact, great. But my actions aren’t a ploy for influence. Influence comes from being passionate about something that captures you entirely, not from calculating SEO techniques to maximize visibility on every social media platform.

This year may mark the end of PodcampSLC and the genesis of a “Social Media Camp” of some kind. Businesses looking to increase their social savvy will send their marketing team to learn all about the rules of transparency and authenticity. They’ll discover the need for openness and unfiltered interaction with readers and clients. But if the entire social media strategy is built up with an end game of increased sales and customer followers, it will be a hollow endeavor.

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An Interview About Technical Writing

Tom Johnson — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:43:04 +0000

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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 readable.

How did you make the career transition from academia and teaching to technical writing?

I taught basic writing courses to university students at The American University in Cairo for a couple of years. I also taught composition as a graduate student at Columbia for two years. Teaching writing is okay, but grading student essays was never fun. It was something I really hated. And at times it was okay — but by and large I felt like I was just justifying Bs and C, having to explain why these essays were poor, how to improve them, and so on. But that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to actually be the writer, not just teach others how to write. So I transitioned into professional writing.

For a while I did copywriting, which was all right, but it didn’t make a whole lot of money. And there’s a certain truth element that’s often missing in the copywriting role. Finally I decided to go into technical writing because it paid better and I thought, well, alright, I’ll try it. And it turned out to be a great fit.

Are you happy with your decision to work in technical communication? Why or why not?

By and large I think I’m pretty happy. Technical writing combines my love of writing and technology. I also enjoy working on projects in IT settings with other people engaged in the same work. That aspect of it that can be really rewarding.

It’s not entirely satisfying, though. It can be a little boring and can lack a little bit of excitement. I mean, you’re not out there saving somebody’s life in an emergency room. You’re not winning a case for some poor person being evicted. You basically sit at a computer all day writing instructions or figuring out how something works, and you occasionally interact with people. It depends on your role, it depends on the project. Some projects are a lot more fun than others, but by and large it is a good choice and I’m happy with it.

Could you tell me a bit about the first technical writing project you ever worked on? What were a few of the challenges – or successes – you faced when first starting out?

I started my tech writing career at a financial institution and, of course, one of the first applications I documented was a financial application. I remember the senior writer who was training me coming over and telling me that I needed to explain individual steps for printing a document. I was blown away by the level of detail I had to include. I couldn’t just assume people could figure things out from a few basic notes (e.g, To print the document, click the Print button). It really had to be detailed instruction (this is something I challenged later).

The other thing she told me is that subject matter experts are somewhat busy and that I needed to save up my questions. That’s something I also challenged later — you can’t have that passive, timid mindset all the time. Sure it’s good idea to save your questions when you’ve got a bunch, but never be afraid of approaching somebody for the information you need.

What advice would you give –- if any -– to those looking to start, or transition into, a career in technical writing?

I wrote a post about this, called 7 Steps to Getting a Job in Technical Writing. The first step is to get a degree in something related to technical writing, usually a degree in English with an emphasis in technical writing. If you have a writing degree, great. But you need to ground yourself in the basics so you know what you’re doing.

After that, get some real experience doing technical writing, because you’re not going to find a job unless you have actual samples of projects you’ve completed. Learn some of the tools. Put together a portfolio. Start a blog. Move to where the jobs are. And volunteer in the STC.

I elaborated on each of those steps in the post. I’m giving a talk about these points later, on October 8th, and I’ll definitely record that. But basically, those are the steps I would suggest. And of course it depends where you are in your career. If you already have a career, the steps to transition into technical writing may be different. My seven steps are intended for students still in the university.

How would you describe your duties on the job? What might a typical day at work for you “look” like?

The typical day thing is hard because days aren’t typical. You do a lot of different things at different points in a project. You may go through like a writing phase, a learning phase, a design phase, a configuration phase (especially with context-sensitive help). I don’t chunk out my days at one-hour intervals doing all these different things. I get in the mode of doing something and spend half the day on it.

For example, here’s how I spent yesterday. First I had to review a handful of presentations for an internal conference. (Sometimes you have to review materials others create.) Then I spent the latter part of the day configuring a relationship table, which is a set of related links for topics. I made sure each page on the user interface had context-sensitive help. I realized that some of the pages I configured weren’t the right pages that I wanted to show up in the context-sensitive help, so I had to add some help topics.

I also spent some time troubleshooting a technical glitch. Whenever somebody clicked the help button, it opened a new window, which is what I wanted, but if they didn’t close the help window and instead clicked the help button again, a new window appeared on top of the previous window, resulting in multiple help windows. So if they clicked the button five times, they would get five different windows open. I tried to figure out how to fix that. Since I don’t really know much JavaScript, it was a little hard. I can code a JavaScript link, but to try to sit there and troubleshoot an advanced JavaScript problem is over my head.

That kind of troubleshooting is typical — trying to get your help to look right, whether it’s troubleshooting something in your help authoring tool or your page layout tool, or whatever — is common. You can spend a lot of time troubleshooting various problems.

What software programs or other technology do you use on a regular basis?

Tools are always a hot topic, but I have decided on MadCap Flare as my help authoring tool, Adobe InDesign as my page layout tool (which I use for shorter documents), and Snagit for screenshots. When I create video tutorials, I use Camtasia studio. I also work with SharePoint. Sometimes I’ll use Photoshop if I’m doing something advanced with graphics. I’ll use Visio if I’m trying to illustrate a workflow or something. On my blog I of course use WordPress. I use most of those tools quite frequently. (I don’t have WordPress at work, but I’m hoping to get an installation going and try to do something there.)

Could you describe a recent challenge you’ve been presented with at work and how (if possible) you were able to overcome it?

I recently discovered that somebody was planning to send out a guide for working with Joomla to build a country website. The guide was just written by a non-writer, somebody who was more of a coordinator. The guide wasn’t very good, and I basically said that. I said, Look, this isn’t good. The guide needs to be rewritten. The instructions aren’t in numbered steps. A lot of details are missing. It doesn’t look very professional. And so of course I ended up having to rewrite it myself, and it took about three weeks. But I felt pretty good about the end result, and I think overall the people using those instructions will be grateful.

It can be a constant challenge to get people in your organization in the mindset that technical writing needs to be done by the technical writing team rather than the project manager or intern. When you have a large organization, it’s easy for people to be unaware of your team, unaware of what you do. They don’t want to be burdened by your process. They sometimes want to just write it themselves in Microsoft Word and get it done — and they don’t realize that it’s terrible. It’s a constant challenge trying to get people in the mindset that the documentation — the manuals, the instruction, the video tutorials, quick reference guides — need to be done by the tech comm department.

What is one of your favorite success stories from working in technical communication? Anything substantial or particularly rewarding that you’ve been able to work on thus far?

I think the way you determine whether something is successful is if you release an application and it takes off. You may just be the technical writer on a team, but you’re also contributing other things. You’re contributing towards usability, you’re interfacing with customers, you’re making sure that things work right. You’re part of an entire team that is building and producing software. If the software is successful, you’re part of that success. We had an internal application at my work that was really successful and it did take off and lots of people started to use it. If you’re not bombarded with a bunch of questions by users, if they’re able to search and find the answers and learn for themselves, that’s also a success.

Do you pursue any continuing education opportunities – either required or optional – for your job? If so, what type(s)?

I do try to keep up with blogs, articles, conferences, and other types of published information. I definitely try and keep up. But official courses? No. There’s a sense of distrust that a lot of people in the industry have about people in the academia. Whether academics are out of touch or not, I don’t know. I’ve seen studies debunking that myth. I’ve also heard academics say they feel out of touch with the current issues in the workplace. So going back to the university to learn how to improve in the workplace isn’t always an idea that’s appealing.

How do you feel that your education did – or perhaps did not – prepare you for your current job? Are there any courses you wish you would have taken or skills that you should have mastered but didn’t? Any regrets?

I have a degree in English and a degree in creative writing. The second one is a Masters degree, the first a Bachelors. Neither prepares you a whole lot in terms of what you’re going to do. You could say that the analytical abilities to assess and comprehend larger structures of text and manipulate them is helpful to you as you organize help topics in a large project. So sure, there’s crossover. In an English degree, you definitely learn grammar and how to write. In fact, just having the love of writing is helpful. But really, as a technical writer, you’re not writing essays, you’re not doing creative writing. You’re not doing literary analysis.

Are these activities truly helpful in preparing you for technical instructions? A little. You need a basic command of the language and good common sense. But if I were doing it again, I would have probably double-majored in English and graphic design or computer science.

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Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

Tom Johnson — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:30:28 +0000

A scholar conducts a 6 year study of student writing and finds that, despite constant accusations that social media is taking writing downhill, actually “we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” I have to agree — it is a cool effect that the social web is creating. The world needs more writers.

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Podcast with Anne Gentle about her Conversation and Community book

Tom Johnson — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:39:41 +0000

[amazon-product align="right"]0982219113[/amazon-product]

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Length: 40 min.

As a follow-up to my review of Anne Gentle’s book, [amazon-product type="text" text="Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation"]0982219113[/amazon-product], I also interviewed her for a podcast. Now you can listen to Anne talk about some of the concepts in her book in a more personal way through the headphones of your iPod. In this 40 minute podcast, we cover questions such as the following:

What’s the first step in connecting with your users?
Why are wikis used more internally than externally?
How can you build trust with users?
What’s the 90-9-1 percent rule and how can you change the 1 percent part?
What three steps can you follow for any strategy with social media?
What is “read wear” and how can you make that content more visible?
What happens when you break the listen-participate-share-then-lead model?
How can you use Twitter into your documentation strategy?
What mindset is antithetical to building conversations and communities with your users?

Additional Resources

Companion site to Conversation and Community on XML Press
Anne Gentle’s blog
XML Press
Tweets converted into T-shirt themes
Posts about Participation Inequality (the 90-9-1 rule)
Sarrah Maddox blog
Stewart Mader
Review by Jefro
Review from Sarah Maddox. (Sarah’s post also lists other reviews.)

To contact Anne, see the contact button on her blog, Just Write Click.