Dawn -- The day is just beginning! Ever since I moved to Eagle Mountain, I've been carpooling with a colleague who picks me up at 5:30 a.m. This means I wake up at 4:45 a.m. to start getting ready. We roll in to work at 6:30 a.m. -- long before the secretary comes in to turn on the lights. In the early morning, I enjoy watching the sun rise slowly over the mountains. It gradually changes the dark scenery outside to gray and then blue. I'v...
If you look in the sidebar of my site, you'll see that I've enlarged the space and included two placeholder ads. I intentionally cleared this space to make way for companies to promote their products and services. I'd Rather Be Writing receives approximately 1200 page views a day from technical communicators all over the world. 1500 people are subscribed to the feed alone, making it one of the most popular technical writing blogs on the I...
Author-it launched a blog today. You can view it at http://author-it.com/blog. Author-it's new blog. Check it out. I had a sneak peek of the blog about a week ago and contacted Kathy Howes for an interview about it. The questions I asked her are below. Why did you decide to start a corporate blog? We see blogging as an essential part of an organization's content strategy, and a great opportunity to directly interact with our clients at ma...
Jayant writes, I am a technical writer from India. I just moved to the UK and find the scenario very different from India. Here technical writing jobs are not easy to come by – I understand this is due to the recession. I also have found my desire for technical writing waning away a bit. This could be because at my previous office, technical writing had been reduced to merely doing language edits of 500 pages in three days. How do I rekin...
If you're starting a corporate blog, you'd be well off with a little mommy blogger training to break you in. After living with a mommy blogger, you'll more naturally embrace transparency, skip any attempts at censorship, and become accustomed to the occasional distorted portrayal of what you say and do. These are all principles I've honestly learned to love from Shannon. Jane: the mommy blogger who trained me Jane is the mommy blogger who...
Last week a student emailed me with some questions about technical writing. I didn't have time to respond, so I forwarded the questions to the Techwr-L listserv, where 6-7 people responded. One of the responses, from Keith Hood, caught my attention. Keith unfolded what one might refer to as the "dark side of technical writing." His response is thought-provoking, and it will make you look carefully at your projected career path. Keith is a...
Listen here: Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As) Several weeks ago I wrote about my trip to Brigham Young University-Idaho and the presentation I gave there titled "Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing." This podcast is a recording of my presentation. My presentation was part of the professional writing conference that BYU-Idaho puts on annually for their writing a...
This is a guest post by Ryan Schmid. Ryan has worked as a Senior Technical Writer and Information Developer in St. Louis, Missouri for nine years. He has previously been published in Intercom. Contact: [email protected]. The August 2008 issue of Technical Communication analyzed the growing domain of virtual worlds. I contributed an article about the large amount of written text they contain. This seems surprising, given their reliance...
Listen here: Deborah Shapiro In this podcast, I talk with Deborah (Shapiro) Hemstreet about the personalities of technical communicators, based on research she conducted as part of her masters degree. I got the idea of interviewing Deborah from on a discussion on the Techwr-L listserv about a movie called The Technical Writer. In the discussion, Deborah wrote, I read the reviews... And it sounds to me (without having wat...
On the Technical Writers of India listserv, someone is trying to get his company to realize the value of technical communication by showing a humorous video on bad documentation that he can use during training. "The idea is to evoke laughter, and keep the audience engaged throughout my presentation." Okay, hands-down, this is the best video to show. Hat tip to Holly Harkness and Karen Shriver for finding this.
Scott Abel, conference organizer extraordinairre Last week I caught up with Scott Abel, a well-known content management guru, for an interview. As you probably know, Scott has been actively organizing conferences all over the United States for the past couple of years -- and he's had tremendous success doing it. I wanted to know the story behind Scott's move into conference organization and why he's been so successful with it. You seem to...
Date: Thursday, 10/23 Time: 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. Location: Salt Lake City Downtown Library Room: Conference Room 2, Second Floor Cost: Free Downtown Salt Lake City Library I'm putting together an STC-Intermountain tonight, from 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. at the Downtown SLC Library – second floor, conference room 2. The meeting is titled, "An Informal Discussion of Any Tech Comm Challenges You're Facing." In this meeting, you can discuss the problems y...
Last weekend I was asked by someone to set up a WordPress blog that would integrate well with his existing site, familyinnewyork.com. I looked at the site and asked why he didn't just migrate his existing content into a blog, one with a professional design? He said no -- he wanted to keep his existing site. When starting blogs, many people have the same dilemma. Typically, a person has crafted a traditional website with all the navigation...
A couple of years ago I went through a Digg phase. I listened to the Diggnation podcast and set my home page to the most popular posts of the day on Digg.com. Digg is a community-driven news site that allows any user to post links to interesting articles and other online content. Others can then vote on the submitted articles. Articles with the most votes appear on the front page. Digg's main focus is technology, and I always thought it w...
User Knowledge Empowers You to Drive the Team Ever since I came back from Doc Train West and had my epiphany about the transformative, empowering nature of user knowledge with the tech writer role, I've wanted to build stronger connections with my users. Having extensive knowledge of user behavior can make you a valuable asset on any project team, allowing you to deliver key advice on application design and development. Additionally, as i...
