Recently I’ve been playing more of a blogger role at my job, doing more user awareness than user education. This will only increase during the coming months, and if I do a good job, I might finally show the importance of this neglected role. Part of the reason we’re doing more user awareness is because we’ve suddenly published dozens of new websites, tools, and other … more »

In my previous post (“Less Text, Please”), I argued that users want shorter texts. I also explained how social media and Internet sites have possibly rewired our brains to incline us toward shorter content — according to some, our gnat-like attention spans can only consume a few short paragraphs before tapping out. The Onion has a great parody of how a single block of uninterrupted … more »

In my post on technical writing resolutions, Marcia Johnston commented, “Inspiring. Bravo, Tom, and good luck. Don’t know how you do it all.” I get that last remark a lot, actually. I don’t feel it’s deserved. I don’t do it all … not at all. I let so many important activities slip through the cracks. But let me indulge in a fantasy where that remark … more »

Students at Missouri State University asked me some questions about technical writing as a career. To provide a balance of opinion and perspective, I opened up the questions to my Twitter followers and asked them to respond as well. What is your job title? Eileen Potter: Senior Product Content Specialist (in June I changed positions within my company, previous title was Senior Technical Writer) Richard … more »

Errol Morris has a lengthy essay in The New York Times on something known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Essentially the effect is that even though something is obviously wrong, a person is incapable of recognizing it. Cornell profesor David Dunning stumbled onto the idea when he read about a bank robber who squirted lemon juice on his face, believing that the juice would mask his … more »

Crisis Point: Problems with Multiple Roles As my attempt to fill the wiki role failed, I started to realize how busy I had become wearing all of these hats. It seemed that I was always logging bugs, answering phone calls or responding to emails, or attending this and that meeting, championing for a redesign of a page, or coordinating with projects. The core help I … more »

In a world of increasing social media, work, activities, and other obligations, it’s easy for our lives to become quickly cluttered. Just last week an old friend wrote and explained that she was finally listening to some of my podcasts and really enjoyed them. In particular, she listened to the podcast with Ricardo Amigo about technical writing, in which I explain some of the new … more »

I love this essay. Paul Graham distinguishes between the “maker’s schedule” and the “manager’s schedule” and talks about the dilemma between offending someone or losing half a day’s work. Fits me perfectly, especially since some of my meetings are half a mile away. His point about the difficulty of switching modes is right on: “For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like … more »

Freakonomics summarizes Paul Graham’s argument that programmers and writers are more disrupted by meetings than managers because of the nature of the tasks programmers and writers are involved in. I completely agree. One hour-long meeting can blow apart my entire afternoon.

After a recent conference call I had for an STC chapter meeting, we needed an online mechanism to keep the discussion going. Doc Guy set up a Google Groups discussion site (which includes a threaded forum and wiki) to facilitate the online discussion, and we started a few threads, but soon the discussion focused , unfortunately, only on scheduling dates for in-person meetings. In a … more »

Pingdom Tools. Nice tool to measure how fast your site loads.

I listened to an interesting podcast this morning. Jason Van Orden argues against a post on the Read/Write blog about podcasting being dead. Jason listed several reasons why people claim podcasting is dead: Yahoo pulled their podcasting directory. Google Trends shows fewer searches with podcasting as the keyword. No one is making millions in the podcasting medium. Podcasts don’t offer rich keywords for search engines … more »