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...
I know the title of this post sounds cliche, but it's how I feel. In 4 days, I'll be driving a 17 ft. U-haul towing a trailer minivan with 3 small children 2500 miles from Florida to Utah, moving into a little town, starting a new job, beginning so many things over. But during our three years in Florida, a lot happened in my life. I want to list them here so I remember. I arrived in Florida from Egypt after having spent 2 yrs teaching wri...
I used to think screenshots weren't necessary when it was obvious where buttons and other links were located. For example, if I wrote something like "Click the Subscribe to the RSS Feed link in the sidebar to subscribe to this blog's RSS feed," you'd think that people could easily follow this instruction. However, after watching user behavior, I have changed my mind. I now think screenshots are important to include even when interface el...
I'm relocating to Utah in late August to accept a new job. I'll be working for EMC, which does contracts with the army base in Dugway, Utah. Dugway is about 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, remotely located in the Salt Lake Desert (see image below). We'll be driving over from Florida, which is about a 2,400 mile drive. We'll actually live in Tooele rather than Dugway. Tooele ("Tuwilla") is a small town (population = 30,000) about 45...
Gigzig is a feature within Payscale.com that shows you where people with your same job title were 5 years ago, and where they are 5 years from now. It's a pretty cool before-and-after path to look at. The technical writing path is particularly interesting to follow. It seems that in five years, most tech writers either become managers or move elsewhere into IT. Gigzig explains how the arrive at this data: Every day many thousands of peop...
This tutorial on Visio's shapes from Microsoft is the best online tutorial I think I've ever seen. If I were modeling my help after a perfect example, it would be this tutorial. Here's why: It contains both audio and text. You can control the audio easily, or just read the text. Each page is short (2 minutes) so your attention span doesn't time out. While you listen to the audio, you look at a graphic that demonstrates the concept expla...
If you've got a minute, please complete a quick survey about a new technical writing track that may possibly be implemented by USF (Univ. of South Florida). The survey's purpose: “We seek your advice on ways to provide the Tampa Bay area with more qualified, desired, and hirable technical communicators.” Survey link: ttp://CTLSilhouette.wsu.edu/surveys/ZS67087
I once read an essay by Joseph Epstein in which he describes the glee and suspense in watching a stranger read his essay. It has happened to many novelists too -- the coincidental (dreamed-about) situation where you encounter a stranger reading page after page of your book, without realizing you're present. I had the opportunity to do somewhat the same today: to watch someone try to follow instructions in a guide I was writing. I learned ...
June 2008 Update: I know you probably found this post by searching for the word Grasshopper. Feel free to save this grasshopper image and use it however you want. I don't know the official name of the grasshopper, but I took the photo in St. Petersburg, Florida. I then removed the background in Photoshop. If you know the specific species name of this grasshopper, let me know. This beautiful grasshopper was hanging out on our patio wall al...
I was reflecting today on Avery's love of reading. When Avery was a baby, Shannon and I had a goal of reading her 3 books a night before bed time. We thought it would be a good idea, and this goal turned into a habit and routine that we have kept up over the years, for the most part. I've watched other parents put their children to bed in 5 minutes, not reading them anything. Now that we've been reading to Avery at bedtime for nearly six ...
Josh Bernoff wrote an intriguing post (titled "I'm sick of users") about why we should avoid the term "users." Josh says, Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about "users" of computers, browsers, and software? Try, just for a day, to stop using this word. You'll be amazed at how differently you think about the world. Web users become people looking for informati...
If you ask someone who has never written technical documentation before to describe a procedure, chances are he or she will give you a document that looks as follows: It completely omits numbered steps. Each paragraph or line is followed by a full-size screenshot that takes up half the page. Quotation marks surround various names somewhat at random. Fortunately these mistakes are easy to fix. Steps When describing a sequence, number eac...
