I admit that I am developing a love affair with grapefruit. Don't get me wrong -- I love many types of fruit. But there's something particularly special about the grapefruit, particularly ruby red grapefruit. Looking at the following image, can anyone really blame me? Try to restrain yourself from reaching out and eating this grapefruit. I'm not sure if I can even pinpoint exactly why I like grapefruit so much. First of all, it's a fruit ...
Neal Kaplan The following is a guest post by Neal Kaplan, a technical writer at Zuora, Inc. Another post about wikis? Why not! Wikis are great! Just to set the stage, I've been a technical writer for a while now, working for software companies in Silicon Valley. (In fact, I often forget that there are technical writers who don't document software.) I've worked at large companies, where I delivered my source files to a production team and...
A couple of years ago, I wanted to try biking to work and made an initial trial with a hybrid cruiser bike that ended up consuming way too much time (about 2 hrs each way). I gave up on the idea, and then winter came and no one bikes to work during winter in Utah. A few months ago, however, I went to Florida to help out one of my parents. During that trip, I came home with my dad's bike, a Specialized City Globe 7.1, which he could no lon...
One of the challenges with wikis (or at least with Mediawiki) is figuring out how to title pages that all belong to the same product or group. I spent a bit of time researching best practices with this and didn't come up with a clear answer. I tried to also figure out why I'd never come across this page titling conundrum before. Here's the problem. On a large wiki, you have pages about many different products. For simplicity sake, let's s...
Mick Davidson The following is a guest post by Mick Davidson, a technical writer with 20 years of professional writing experience. Before I get started I'd like to thank Tom for giving me this opportunity to bang on about why I think wikis are the future for technical documentation. Like many writers, up to a few years ago I was plodding around using backwoods technology, stuck with systems that had once been great but now begged to be r...
The following is a guest post by Akshay Bardia, a technical writer in Mumbai, India. Akshay Bardia Technical communicators work odd hours of the day as we cater to clients in different parts of the world. So, you could find yourself yawning on the Tokyo shift, worrying about the traffic on the way back in the normal shift, or dozing off during the West coast shift. If you are doing the early shift, while your friends are busy snoring you...
The following is a guest post by Lopa Mishra, a technical writer in Mumbai, India. Lopamudra Mishra At a college reunion party recently, someone asked me what job I'm pursuing. On replying that I'm a writer, a friend jumped in to clarify that I'm a "technical" writer. My friend considers that technical writing has nothing to do with creativity, contrary to "plain" writing which is a highly ingenious endeavor. To be honest, I was of ...
In my writing role at work , I occasionally post updates on behalf of our IT organization to various social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, our blog, and a user forum. Most of my activity on these social media channels is sparse and sporadic -- a few minutes on an occasional hour. However, lately I've felt that we aren't tapping into social media's potential. We're hardly using it at all, despite the fact that we h...
In 2004, when I returned from a teaching stint in Egypt and began working as a copywriter for a health company in Clearwater, Florida, my manager insisted that I track something related to my writing. We decided that I would track word count, because this was the easiest thing to track. Each week, I graphed the number of words I published, and during a weekly meeting, I held up my graph. If the number decreased for the week, I formatted t...
I'm attending three conferences this year: Confab, the STC Summit, and Lavacon. Why did I pick these conferences, over others? Ben Minson and me at a previous STC Summit I attended Confab's inaugural conference last year and felt it was a good fit for my web publishing role at work. Although my job title is "senior technical writer," I spend about 60% of my time being a web editor for LDSTech. LDSTech has a blog, wiki, and forum, and in ...
The following is a guest post by Sarah Maddox, a technical writer at Atlassian. Sarah Maddox In a recent conversation, Tom mentioned that he's been pondering this question: "Why, in a time when collaboration is more important than ever, do wikis still remain mostly unused as a help authoring tool in tech comm departments?" Tom asked me to join his ponderings and write a guest post on the topic. Thanks for the invitation and the thought-p...
I was completely incensed to read Yahoo's categorization of technical writing as the #1 laid-back career. In 5 Low-Stress Career Options, the writer makes the ridiculous claim that technical writing isn't just a low-stress job, but is apparently the #1 lowest-stress job of any career in America! Laid-back Career #1: Technical Writer Technical writers often write articles, manuals, and instruction booklets on a variety of topics, including...
I just got back from a 4 mile jog up and down the night sidewalks of my city. I'm not much of a jogger, but after a day of sledding, parenting, traveling, cooking, and changing baby diapers, I needed to get out for an hour on my own. It's relatively cold in Utah at night. About 34 degrees right now, so I wear a balaclava and gloves. And of course I have on a sweater and exercise pants too. But more important than anything, I have my iPhon...
A while ago I tweeted about how poor I am with email. I've tried various methods. I tried automatically filtering all the non-essential email into subfolders, but as some commenters pointed out, I soon never checked these subfolders. I tried unsubscribing from everything, but this seemed an impossible task. Then Will Sansbury recommended that I try The Email Game, and I actually love it. The Email Game The Email Game works only with Gmail...
Listen here: A couple of weeks ago I gave an STC webinar called Designing Quick Reference Guides. This was a general STC webinar, and usually I am not allowed to repost the recording, but due to some audio difficulties, I had to re-record it, and the STC gave me permission to post the re-recording. Here are the files to watch or download the webinar: zip (includes mp4 video) Slides only Audio only
