My 2016 technical writing trends/predictions turned out to be pretty accurate. For 2017 technical writing trends, I'm predicting that more technical writers turn to Github in their documentation workflows. This trend applies mainly to companies where programming technical writers work with engineers to create developer documentation.
Simplified Technical English (STE) is an approach to writing developed by the aerospace and defense industries to simplify technical documentation. STE consists of a dictionary of about 900 allowed words and a set of 65 writing rules. Together, this controlled language is formalized into a specification called ASD-STE100, which many regulatory industries must follow to ensure clear, consistent content. HyperSTE is a plugin offered by Etteplan to check your content for adherence to the rules and grammar of the ASD-STE100 specification.
Andrew Etter presented about his book, Modern Technical Writing, to the STC Silicon Valley chapter on January 24, 2017 in Santa Clara, California. In the presentation, Andrew talks about the strategies he implemented at Palantir to change to a new way of doing docs. This new way includes having a smaller team, using text editors, writing in plain text, processing pull requests instead of bugs, and more. He dives into lightweight markup syntax, static site generators, version control tools, and more, as well as challenges he has faced.
I recently gave a presentation titled Writing tech docs like a hacker with Jekyll to the to the Southern Ontario STC chapter (on Jan 18, 2017). In the presentation, I introduce reasons why we started using Jekyll, how static site generators differ from content management systems, how to get started with Jekyll, and challenges involved in using Jekyll for technical documentation sites.
This past year the stats on my blog showed some surprising results. From about mid-2016 on through the present, there was a notably upward trend in page views. I attribute the upward trend primarily to some posts on Swagger. The larger trend is that all top posts on my site could be classified as documentation content.
Recently I gave a presentation on Swagger as part of the TC Dojo webinar series. If you missed the presentation, you can view the Swagger recording here.
If you look at the surveys and other data collected about tool usage and priorities in the technical communication field, it's impossible not to acknowledge FrameMaker as one of the most common tools. Year after year it appears at the top of the charts, and print publishing remains a high priority. Although commonly known for its print publishing capabilities, FrameMaker also has an excellent responsive HTML5 web output. Getting responsive design right is difficult, particularly with documentation websites that have robust navigation sidebars. FrameMaker's responsive output is both mobile-friendly and impressively designed.
MadCap Central, recently released in early January, is a new cloud-based collaboration and publishing solution for tech docs from MadCap Software. MadCap Central allows you to configure and deploy Flare builds from a central server. You can also manage tasks, teams, users, and other details related to each of your projects in MadCap Central.
With developer documentation roles, some level of coding is required. But you don't need to know as much as developers, and acquiring that deep technical knowledge will usually cost you expertise in other areas.
I'm giving a TC Dojo presentation this Monday morning (Jan 9) on Swagger. If you're interested, you can register and attend for free. The event will also be recorded.
TC Camp is holding its annual free unconference for Tech Comm on Jan. 21 in Santa Clara. TC Camp starts with morning workshops given by experts in the field for a nominal fee. The unconference follows, where attendees vote on the topics to be discussed. It's a great event for networking and exchanging ideas, and I'll definitely be there.
I've been thinking about how I should focus my time with knowledge building in my tech writing career, especially given my context in a large organization. Lately, rather than primarily writing content, I've been playing more of a content curator / tools developer / publisher role. I'm okay with this. But sometimes I feel like I have to choose between acquiring deep technical knowledge versus acquiring deep tech doc tools/publishing knowledge.
Episode 2 in the Write the Docs podcast is now available. The topic of episode 2 is findability: How do you allow your users to find what they're looking for in your documentation? We talk about various tools for findability: search, tags, faceted filters, sidebar navigation, inline links, related links, terms/glossaries, and breadcrumbs. In this post, I also share a few more details about Lunr search.
This past week I made some contributions to the Jekyll documentation, and in making the pull requests, I realized why technical writing is often so difficult. Making a request to one documentation topic often requires you to adjust other topics as well. So often we place the bar for contribution at whether someone can write. In reality, it's not just whether someone can construct clear, grammatically correct sentences. It's whether the person can integrate the information into a larger documentation set.
The Write the Docs community now has a podcast available. The podcast follows a discussion-based format with several co-hosts talking about recent articles or topics related to tech comm. The podcast is available on almost every podcast platform.
