A listener to the Tech Writer Voices podcast suggested I do a podcast on the following: Give ideas to people who are just starting out in technical writing. What is the base of knowledge that every technical writer should have? And so in preparation for the podcast, I offer these five skills or characteristics as absolute musts for the technical writer: 1. Facility with technology You have to be somewhat technical, although there are man...
My article, "Top 5 Podcasts for Technical Communicators," appeared in STC's Intercom today. It's in the Cut & Paste section here (stc login required). I didn't have a lot of space to expand, so I thought I'd take the liberty here. First, settling on just 5 podcasts was agonizing and I thought about it for weeks, constantly drawing up lists and ranking them. I actually submitted 10 podcast recommendations, hoping they would say okay we...
Sports doesn't always parallel life, but here's one that's relevant for the season. Although penalties in football are usually looked upon as costly mistakes, they can actually be a good thing -- they demonstrate aggressiveness. Holding back your players into a passive, milquetoast attitude can be worse than racking up a half a dozen penalties. Aggressiveness also happens to be an important quality for technical writers, even if it also r...
Listen here: In this carcast, I deliver a 20 minute monologue about the best way to get information from SMEs: sit by them, permanently if possible. Many IT organizations station the writer remotely from the developers, programmers, and other SMEs, but nothing could be more damaging to getting the information you need. Increasing your proximity also increases the communication you receive. Music is from 37Hz. More about...
One of the blogs I enjoy reading is Beth Long's Spork in the Road. Beth, who I knew from the Suncoast chapter, is interested in the intersection of the creative and the technical. As I remember, she was writing a novel when I left, and was very focused on it. She also had a very enviable job creating fictional text for an online game. Here's an excerpt from her latest post: Optimism afflicts me in both my worlds, web development and ficti...
Google Reader lets you share posts from the feeds you read. Right now I have a tremendously long commute in a carpool and I started using Google Gears' offline reading for my feeds. It works quite well -- until the car starts winding around a narrow mountain road and I feel like I'm going to throw up. But for a while, it does allow me some time to check out my feeds. At the top of my blog there's a link called "shared from google reader."...
Listen here: This podcast features the June presentation that Char James-Tanny gave to the Suncoast Florida chapter on virtual ways of communicating. Char is the secretary of the STC and a well-known expert on AuthorIT, RoboHelp, and other tools. In this presentation, she talks about second life, blogs, wikis, mashups, skype, and other virtual ways of communicating. Her blog is at helpstuff.com/blog. About Tech Writer V...
If you enjoy podcasts, check out Act One of the "Devil in Me" episode of This American Life. The episode explores how Iraqi war veteran Sam Slaven returns from Iraq with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a fear of Iraqis. Just being in the same room with an Iraqi makes him start trembling and thinking of ways to remove him (for example, by "choking him out"). Sam recognizes the irrationality of his fear. After he enrolls in college, he d...
You can unsubscribe from feeds in Google Reader via the Feed Management page (see image below), but it's not the most efficient way of managing the feeds. Using this method to unsubscribe can be tedious and time-consuming, because you have to leave the page you're on and then scroll down to find the feed you want to unsubscribe from. Instead, to unsubscribe from feeds in Google Reader: 1. Assuming you're reading feeds from the All Items ...
Scott Abel's The Content Wrangler has a cool example of using AJAX (asynchronous javascript) in his blog to increase usability. Kevin Shoesmith is the blog designer behind the Wrangler's makeover. I'm really impressed by the new site design, particularly the AJAX functionality. (Here's Scott's more detailed explanation of AJAX.) Overall the site looks more professionally organized and designed than it was before. The software running The ...
After a five-month hiatus, Aaron and Scott at DMN Communications returned to the podcasting scene. In this Sep 9 podcast, they discuss whether technical writing is calling or just a job? By calling, they refer to treating tech writing as if you were destined to be a tech writer, as if it was a sacred duty you were compelled by almost a higher power to complete. Some writers exhibit this tech-writing-as-calling attitude by writing lavish...
Sometimes I would like to change my job title from "technical writer" to investigative reporter, because so often this is the task that we have. Information we need is not online, not in any documents, not even available in the application itself. We have to pry it from the minds of subject matter experts (SMEs), the techies who talk in acronyms and dream in code. Surely one of the worst mistakes tech writers can make is to just stay in t...
Occasionally people send me links to check out, and they encourage me to use them as fodder for my blog. I've let them build up a bit this past month. Here are three. (I'm copying and pasting from their emails -- I hope that's all right.) I haven't actually explored them yet, but some might be interesting. Let me know if you have any feedback. Scriblink "I recently launched a website that I think would be great on your blog. It's called ...
It's been a while since my last post. Sure I've busy with the move and new job, but I've also just fallen out of the habit of blogging. I know blogging can be evidence of an active, engaged mind, so I don't ever want to give it up. Please don't mistake my absence for a permanent vacation. I'm just in transition right now and other things are on the forefront of my life. So where has my mind been? I've been learning a lot about storage are...
I have been thinking a lot about how we accumulate an excessive amount of "stuff," which turns out mostly to be junk. I'm not afflicted with packrat syndrome. And scouting out good deals at garage sales is not my idea of a Saturday morning well-spent. In fact, I don't even have a garage, nor do I want one. Ninety percent of the people I know who own garages fill them with unnecessary items. Still, in packing and moving, I realized that we...
