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 ...
You know the typical scenario -- the technical writer is the last one to be notified of changes to the application (be it interface or functionality), and developers hate reviewing the manuals we write. Recently a business analyst explained an interesting technique to me for not only discovering software changes, but also building rapport with developers. He said that in a previous company, he bought all the technical writers video camera...
Reading this post by Scott Berkun made me want to be a workaholic. Here's an excerpt: Show me a genius and I'll show you a workaholic. Van Gogh produced 2000 works of art between 1880 and 1890 (1100 paintings and 900 sketches). That's 4 works of art a week for a decade, and he didn't start making art until his mid twenties. DaVinci's famous journals represent decades of note taking, doodling and observations, and it's a good guess that wo...
In this three-minute STC Atlanta podcast, Judy Glick Smith says she's tired of trying to convince sales people of the value of documentation. She says she's "tired of fighting the good fight." No doubt as a technical writer you've heard the phrase, "No one reads the help anyway." They let out a small chuckle to indicate that they're only kidding, although deep down they're being totally serious. Many people believe help files are almost i...
I've been using PodPress, a WordPress plugin that adds an audio player to your posts, for about a year now. But today I'm saying goodbye to this plugin. Although Podpress includes size and duration, adds iTunes tags, and shows download counts, it is filled with compatibility problems with WordPress. It seems every time WordPress updates to a new version, PodPress breaks. Lately PodPress has failed to work entirely, despite supposed compat...
