Recently the Hat Matrix Blog (aka, the Mad Hatter) published the results of a tools survey that included 590 participants. The respondents were asked what authoring tools they used on a regular basis. They answered as follows: Flare: 40% Framemaker: 33% RoboHelp: 27% Author-it: 13% Dreamweaver: 13% HTML Help Workshop: 12% Madpak: 12% WebWorks ePublisher: 11% helpware FAR: 7% RoboHelp for Word: 7% Adobe Tech Comm Suite: 7% I also recent...
Lucy on the laptop at age 2. Lucy turned 2 today. You may have remembered her cute little smile from a previous picture.
The Boredom Myth -- tech writing is more than just formatting phone books Last week I drove up at Rexburg, Idaho to give a presentation on technical writing to the English majors at Brigham Young University Idaho (BYU-I) as part of their annual Pre-Professional Writing Conference. Most of the students in the group intend to pursue a literary career, such as writing books, editing manuscripts in publishing houses, or teaching literature i...
Nearly two weeks ago I posted a survey about 10 technical writing stereotypes. 221 people participated in the survey. The results are below. 1. Technical writing is boring. Generally True: 7% Sometimes True, Sometimes False: 46% Generally False: 47% 2. Technical writing stifles your creativity. Generally True: 10% Sometimes True, Sometimes False: 32% Generally False: 58% 3. You do a lot of writing as a technical writer. Generally True: 12...
Hi Tom, My name is Hannah, and I live in San Antonio, Texas. I found your web site when I typed technical writing in google.com. You have a beautiful family. I am a part-time Accountant for a non-profit organization. I do not enjoy accounting and the desire to write has always been a part of my soul. My desire to write burns in my heart daily. The part-time accounting position pays the bills, however I need to find a way to obtain a ...
HelpScribe: Why software is the best technical writing field
Last night my oldest daughter (who is seven years old) finally learned to ride a bike. After a few painful crashes learning the traditional way (where you just receive a push and try to go), Jane read a tip on one of her mommy blogs about a new method to teach children to ride a bike: Remove both pedals from the bike. Lower the seat all the way. Let the child scoot along with the bike using her feet for as long as she wants. This helps t...
Paul Pehrson, a Utah-based technical writer who blogs at Technically Speaking, writes, I've been invited to speak at the DITA Tech/Comm Conference at the beginning of next month. I've got a free conference registration I'd like to give away, and I wondered if you'd like to give it away on your blog. (I don't think I get enough traffic on my blog for that.) ... It's a full 4-day registration, with a retail value of $795 dollars. Do you nee...
As college students contemplate careers in technical writing, they often hesitate because of negative stereotypes about the profession. As with many stereotypes, these aspects of technical writing can describe some situations for some people, but as a whole they aren't necessarily true. I've listed Ten Technical Writing Stereotypes -- tell me if the stereotypes hold generally true for you or not. You can take the survey here: http://www....
Richard Miller presented on "Using WordPress as a CMS" at Wordcamp Utah today. Richard works for the More Good Foundation, whose mission is to help LDS church members share their beliefs online. The More Good Foundation has migrated 40+ websites from Dreamweaver to WordPress, and now manages 150 WordPress sites. In addition to his work with the More Good Foundation, Richard is also the author of the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin. Richar...
Ash Buckles presented on "SEO tips for Your Blog" at Wordcamp Utah. Here are my notes from Ash's presentation. Strategy and Purpose Ash says, You need a strategy with search engine optimization (SEO); otherwise you're just pinging content all over the place. Everyone has an agenda, a strategy, or a reason – or should. If you don't have a reason, you should shut your blog down and walk away. (He later took some criticism for this comment.)...
Thom Allen presented on WordPress and Podcasting at Wordcamp Utah. Below are my notes, which I mostly took from his slides. See Thom's full presentation here. Preparing Your Podcast Capture extensive metadata in the ID3 tags of your audio file. This helps increase the visibility. Give your podcast files a human readable name (not something like nar0081008.mp3). Host your own podcast files. This allows you to reap the benefits of the sear...
(live blogged) During some preliminary technical issues … Jane says, "I can feel the nerdiness vibes increase …." And then checks her blog and sees that she just won another bloggy award. Someone twitters that he doesn't know a single person at Wordcamp. Guy next to me searches Twitter and finds his tweet. I follow him. Then Shannon points out that the guy who sent the tweet is sitting right next to me. Same table. Holy smokes. Technical...
Are you interested in going to Doc Train East in Massachusetts at the end of October? I have a free ticket that Scott Abel allowed me to give to one of the readers of my blog. If you're interested, send me an email at [email protected]. Update: Lots of responses this morning -- thanks. I've now given it away. Actually, I ended up giving away about 10.
Everyone knows it's a good practice to chunk your help material into discrete topics, but how granular should you chunk it? Take a look at this Microsoft Word 2007 help topic on inserting headers and footers. Example of a Quick Menu Although inserting headers and footers is the main task, the topic really has 11 related tasks: Insert the same header or footer on each page Make the first page header or footer different from the rest of th...
