One outcome of any good conference is to make you think critically about your professional role and identity. I just returned from three days in Portland at Lavacon. It was the first time I’ve attended Lavacon, even though I have been helping out with the website for several years. I’m from Tacoma, just 120 miles Continue Reading »
Tag Archives: story
Using JIRA to Track Writing Assignments
We had a couple of writing interns join our group this month. To track writing assignments for the technology blog, I’ve been using JIRA. JIRA is a bug tracking tool from Atlassian (the same company that makes Confluence). It’s typically used by software teams to track bugs during software development projects. You can add comments Continue Reading »
Visual Storytelling Guides: A New Deliverable in Technical Communication?
When I read books to my little girls (ages 5 and 7), the pictures combined with story provide a captivating experience. I’ve often thought that if I wanted to create documentation that people actually read, maybe I should integrate these two same elements: picture and story. I’m not entirely sure what a product would look Continue Reading »
Book Review: A Practical Guide to Designing with Data, by Brian Suda
A Practical Guide to Designing with Data (Five Simple Steps, 2010), by Brian Suda, is a thorough exploration of best practices for graphs and charts. It’s somewhat similar to Edward Tufte’s Visualizing Information in focus, and both have a shared antipathy toward “chart junk” in the effort to tell the story of data. Suda explains, Continue Reading »
Where Topic-Based Authoring Fails: End-to-End Scenarios
After my Summit presentation about breaking out of topic-based hierarchies, a lady named Ursula came up to me and said she was tired of topic-based authoring. I asked her what the alternative was. She said she’s often more interested in seeing an end-to-end process rather than a specific task. This reminded me of a tutorial Continue Reading »
My Brand Is …
I’ve been thinking lately about my brand. I’ve always hated this marketing term, but the word “brand” does help answer a question. When you think of me, what comes to your mind? I’ve written about a lot of different topics on this blog, everything from findability to podcasting, blogging, technical writing, flare, wikis, screencasts, project Continue Reading »
Podcast: Finding and Creating Relevant Content — Strategies for Social Media
Download MP3 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 Continue Reading »
Replaceability
About a month ago, I was talking with some of my friends at church when my wife Jane came into the room crying and asking where Kevin was. I wasn’t sure what happened, but I soon found out. Jane had been substituting in Primary, a class for children. During a game where everyone gets to Continue Reading »
Organizing Content as Story [Organizing Content #17]
With my ongoing series on organizing content, I left off at the question of whether blog platforms would outperform help authoring tools as a way to organize content for web environments. I had a lot of thoughts about that topic, and actually created a blog theme for a documentation project as a test, but recently Continue Reading »
Designing from the Content/Story Out
My wife Jane attended a Segullah writer’s retreat conference this weekend. During the conference, one of the presenters explained a common mistake many novice writers make: they look for stories to fit a pre-selected theme. You hear the result of this strategy most commonly in church talks. Someone is assigned a topic, or has a Continue Reading »