I hosted a technical writing booth at my 8th-grade daughter's career fair day, but almost no one stopped by. Deflated, I tried to analyze why. I realized that in becoming an adult and family provider, my world-view shifted to a focus on survival and profit, which is far from the world-view of students.
I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll because I want to use the same publishing paradigms for both tech comm and the web. Jekyll also loads more quickly.
If you want to encourage engineers to write documentation, integrate your writing tools and process into their toolchain and workflow.
Peter Gruenbaum's API technical writing course on Udemy is an excellent starting point for learning API documentation. He explores one of the more difficult parts of API documentation, which is describing JSON and XML data structures (usually in responses).
Just a heads up, with comments on my blog, I'm now using Disqus as opposed to the native commenting system in WordPress. This means you'll need to log in using one of the four methods provided by Disqus (Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Disqus) to leave a comment. Why did I switch from WordPress' native comments to Disqus? Several reasons: Too much spam gets past Akismet. For every real comment, I have to delete about 10 spam comments. I'll...
Listen here: A few weeks ago I gave a presentation to a small group of beginning technical writers in India. The presentation was a 20 minute introduction to technical writing, and I gave the presentation over Skype. Slides Here are the slides: Links to more information This presentation is similar to another introductory podcast I recorded on technical writing some years ago.
The other week I gave a introductory presentation on API documentation to the East Bay STC chapter in Silicon Valley. Here are the slides and recording.
User-centered documentation 1.0 Podcast: How to Create User-Centered Documentation, Interview with Joe Sokohl 1.1 Writing User-Centered Documentation, or, My Best Days as a Technical Writer 1.2 New series: User-centered documentation ...
Jekyll versus DITA 1.0 Check out Ed Marsh's podcast, and also My New series: Jekyll versus DITA 1.1 Authoring with Markdown in Jekyll versus Authoring with DITA in OxygenXML 1.2 Variables and conditional processing in Jekyll versus DITA ...
User-centered documentation 1.0 Podcast: How to Create User-Centered Documentation, Interview with Joe Sokohl 1.1 Writing User-Centered Documentation, or, My Best Days as a Technical Writer 1.2 New series: User-centered documentation ...
May 16, 2015 update: For the recording and slides, see this post. If you're in the San Francisco Bay area (near Oakland, actually), you might be interested in an upcoming presentation I'm giving to the STC Berkeley chapter this Wednesday. Details are on the STC Berkeley chapter site. I also included the description below: Jekyll versus DITA: Bridging the Gap between Tech Comm and the Web Although the web continues to burst at the seams w...
User-centered documentation 1.0 Podcast: How to Create User-Centered Documentation, Interview with Joe Sokohl 1.1 Writing User-Centered Documentation, or, My Best Days as a Technical Writer 1.2 → New series: User-centered documentation 1...
Jekyll versus DITA 1.0 Check out Ed Marsh's podcast, and also My New series: Jekyll versus DITA 1.1 Authoring with Markdown in Jekyll versus Authoring with DITA in OxygenXML 1.2 Variables and conditional processing in Jekyll versus DITA ...
Jekyll versus DITA 1.0 Check out Ed Marsh's podcast, and also My New series: Jekyll versus DITA 1.1 Authoring with Markdown in Jekyll versus Authoring with DITA in OxygenXML 1.2 Variables and conditional processing in Jekyll versus DITA ...
Jekyll versus DITA 1.0 Check out Ed Marsh's podcast, and also My New series: Jekyll versus DITA 1.1 Authoring with Markdown in Jekyll versus Authoring with DITA in OxygenXML 1.2 Variables and conditional processing in Jekyll versus DITA ...
