In Hashtag #TechComm: An Overview of Members, Networks, and Themes from 2016-2019, published in Technical Communication Journal (68.2 May 2021), Chris Lam identifies trends and themes in the tech comm field by looking 75,000+ tweets that used the hashtag #techcomm from 2016 to 2019. Previously, academics looked at job advertisements to identify trends, so this Twitter analysis for data provides a new approach to identifying trends. Read more »
I added three topics to a new section in my API doc course called "Balancing product overviews with getting started tutorials." I'm still adding to this section but wanted to share the current content. These are all first drafts that I hope to refine a bit with more imagery, proofreading, examples, and other detail, so if you have feedback, let me know in the comments. I'm trying to explore reasons why these two content types often fail or are weak. It's less of a best practices section and more like an analysis about causes. Read more »
Because it's NBA championship finals time, I thought it might be fun to write a basketball-themed post focusing on basketball strategies that succeeded or failed, and how any of these strategies might apply to technical writing. Beyond the specifics of any particular strategy, the larger application to tech comm is to simply formulate a strategy, to think strategically about how to "win" at technical writing. With that, let's jump into five basketball strategies. Read more »
In this podcast, Fabrizio Ferri joins us for a discussion about adding both personal identity and personality to documentation. Why are the docs we write so often anonymous, and does that anonymity work against career progression? Are tech writers, typically introverts, averse to publicity, or does our industry not allow for it? And if you want to be a "personality" in the tech communications world, what do you do? How do you add personality constructively to your work without disrupting corporate brand and consistency? Read more »
Last week I wrote a post about ambiguous content and how one aspect of being a senior tech writer is taking on more ambiguous projects. In this post, I want to continue this thread on what it means to be a senior tech writer, or even a lead technical writer. But rather than exploring ambiguous content, senior/lead tech writers also have a lot more project/program management responsibilities as well. There are at least five key responsibilities I'll explore here: prioritizing work, defining doc strategies, organizing work among multiple writers, reviewing contributions, and reporting upward. Read more »