It turns out that you can get out of a slump or handle pressure situations comfortably by merely changing your facial expressions. I have been trying this over the past several days and have been completely stunned with what happens. Background This is not my own theory. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a mind reader, Silvan Tomkins, who can see and interpret the expressions on people's faces so well that he seems to read their mind...
Download MP3 Duration: 27 min. In this podcast, I talk with Bill Albing, founder of KeyContent.org, about the impact of social media on technical communication. Bill talks about different ways social media helps audiences interconnect and interact. Good social media technologies enable professionals to collaborate easily, without being encumbered by complicated technology or even burdened by managing and filtering feeds. Bill explains th...
Quite a few people stumble across my blog searching for information on technical writing. One recent stumbler, Nick, writes with the following question: I'm studying tech writing and I happened upon this site (blog) and I'm asking myself what can I get from this thing called "blog" and what can I give to it. It seems that most of the people who respond are lecturers or advisers in the field and not , per-se, regular sloggers trying to ma...
I recently decided to look at the top 10 posts on various bloggers' sites and see what characteristics, if any, the top 10 had in common. Top 10 post lists are usually aggregated by plugins that measure hits, comments, and trackbacks, and then compile the most visited 10. Or they are derived from hit counters such as Google Analytics. The results of my analysis surprised me. It turns out there are three qualities that usually characterize...
We're taught to stop and think carefully before making an important decision. But in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell finds that in complex situations, our initial two-second judgments are often more accurate than judgments derived from lengthy, painstaking analyses. Although Gladwell is careful to explore situations where two-second judgments fail, the most interesting scenarios are where rapid cognition succeeds. It contradicts reason to think t...
Alan Houser, principal of Group Wellesley consultants, makes an insightful observation about non-leader blogs: …Much of the really appealing blog content is being generated by former “non-leaders” — those who have valid, insightful opinions, and who have become recognized in our profession through their blogs. (see comment | see Alan's blog) In other words, people who don't hold high-up leadership positions are often the ones with more in...
In light of New Year's day and goal-making (I used to be an obsessive goal-maker), here are two stories that relate to motivation and desire. Story 1: Socrates A young man visits Socrates in search of wisdom. To the young man's surprise, Socrates takes him out to a lake and dunks his head under water. As the man's struggle to come up for air, Socrates holds him under. Later, after recovering, the young man asks Socrates why he nearly drow...
In a recent episode on The Engaging Brand podcast, business coach Anna Farmery interviews Mark Sanborn, author of You don't need a title to be a leader, on the topic of self-confidence. Farmery says many people have aspirations to write a book, but lack the self-confidence to do it. Sanborn says you can use a blog as a tool to build confidence and write a book. Sanborn explains, Book writing is more about initiative and effort than con...
I merged my blog (idratherbewriting.com) and podcast (techwritervoices.com) into one site. If you go to techwritervoices.com, it redirects to idratherbewriting.com. All the posts that were on techwritervoices.com are now on idratherbewriting.com. See the right column for podcast information. All podcasts are in a category called Tech Writer Voices, which has its own podcast feed, the same feed as before (http://feeds.feedburner.com/techwr...
Charles Jeter recorded an excellent podcast with Mike Hamilton, V.P. of product management at Madcap Software, and posted it on his blog yesterday. Jeter is a technical writer in the California area who has been carefully analyzing the online help tool market. The following are some of my takeaways from the podcast: In an interesting real estate twist, Madcap moved back into 7777 Fay Avenue, which is where the former Blue Sky Software h...
I recently received an email from a reader who asked to know what the job of a technical writer is like. Anoop writes, I am a computer science Master's student at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. I am in my second year and I am on the lookout for jobs. Other than the system software engineer posts, I am considering applying for a job as a technical writer too. I do love witing as much or maybe more than I love coding and und...
Rob Houser's recent article in Writers UA, "What's New in RoboHelp 7?", is a thorough, insightful article I highly recommend. After reading his review, I thought I'd post a few notes from my experiences with the same. (For more about Rob, see his site.) This past month I've been heavily using the RoboHelp 7 and Captivate 3 components of the Technical Communication Suite. RoboHelp 7 offers some impressive new features: snippets, breadcrumb...
I'm going to be presenting on blogging within the next several months, and without a doubt, the hardest part about blogging is not the technical aspect. The hardest part is writing interesting posts. Here's a technique I find works well. Start with the premise that every day, some new thought will strike you as being intriguing. When that moment occurs, write a descriptive word on your hand. Later that evening, type a couple of paragraphs...
I've been rethinking a previous post I wrote about the best response to the remark, "Nobody reads the help anyway. " A better response is to ask people (at just the right time) to raise their hands if they've ever searched a help file. Unless someone is totally unique, most likely everyone has tried using help. When everyone has his or her hand raised to indicate they've used help, it provides irrefutable evidence that help is used. The R...
After reading Scott Berkun's essay on the how to be a genius, I listened to some of his podcasts too. One myth is that geniuses get their ideas almost out of the sky -- Newton is watching an apple fall from the tree when he suddenly discovers gravity. Archimedes is taking a bath when he realizes the physics of buoyancy. Here's an excerpt of this Archimedes myth from Wikipedia: According to Vitruvius, a new crown in the shape of a laurel ...
