In my last post on wikis, Mark Baker added an astute comment: I'm not a wiki fan myself — I'm a structured text guy bred in the bone — but I am fascinated by the trend, and by the variety reactions to it. Wikis started more as a cultural statement than a technology. They were a tool for the democratization of content, the intent being to eliminate the distinction between reader and writer. In the wiki philosophy, every reader was also a w...
I received the following question from a graduate student doing research in technical writing: Right now I am working on some research with some other students, trying to determine whether technical writing should begin to be integrated more in high school level English classes so that when students reach college they have experience with writing professionally, and not solely with creative writing. As an expert in the field, I am wonderi...
5/23/2012 Update: See a more updated post, When Wikis Succeed and Fail. Last week I was feeling a bit stretched out about not having enough time to accomplish everything I needed to do. Granted, I gave several webinars to a total of 2,000 people, which was somewhat stressful, but I was more stressed about the fact that the help material I'd created could have been much better if I had only more time to focus on it. And it wasn't just help...
Each technical communication conference I attend, one of the activities that attendees look forward to is strolling through the exhibit hall, perusing the various tech comm booths, picking up freebies and fliers, listening to vendor pitches, and generally taking in the tech comm world of products. With that in mind, and as an opportunity to give more visibility to my sponsors, I offer a regular "Message from the Sponsors" post. I give eac...
Jan 22, 2012 update: For results of the survey, see this post: Graduate Research Findings on Technical Communication and Blogging. A graduate student is collecting information about technical writers and blogging. For more information, see her explanation below and then take the survey (it's short): My name is Michelle, and I am a first-year Master's student studying Technical Communication. Currently, I am working on a research project ...
We have a sweet job opening for a senior technical writer at the LDS Church in Riverton, Utah. Here's the short description: This position will join the User Education team in creating excellent user documentation, help files, and training materials for a diverse group of users across many departments throughout the Church. Types of deliverables include online help and printed manuals for software applications; one- to two-page quick refe...
In some of the previous tech comm circles I've been in, I've heard some people refer to marketing as "the dark side." I think this term is used to suggest that marketers are involved in thinly stretched promises, flashy features material, and other manipulative, fluffy materials for customers. In contrast, technical writers are writing truth, creating content that is helpful, informative, grounded in reality, and beneficial/wholesome to u...
About four months ago, I posted a call for volunteer writers who might be interested in helping out with the LDSTech blog. Since that time, about 60 volunteers have joined the project. Some are more enthusiastic than others, and some have more writing talent than others. It's not easy to determine talent and motivation based on signups alone. Some jump in eagerly right from the beginning; others lurk for weeks. Regardless of the variety o...
Recently, at my request, one of my user research colleagues did some usability testing on a webhelp file. He did what's called a “treejack,” which is a method that asks users to identify the place in a navigation system they would go to find a topic. For example, if you were trying to figure out how to schedule a projector on a calendar (to use a scenario from my treejack), where would think you would find it in the navigation tree? The u...
In taking my kids out trick or treating last night, I paraded them past many lavishly decorated homes with "cute spooky" arrangements, outdoor music, and other scary yard setups. One guy's display definitely outperformed everyone else's on the block. It looked like he dropped $500 on Halloween gear and other decorations -- lights flashed with thunder sounds, revealing a ghost and other ghastly figures overlooking a yard cemetery. But as w...
I was talking to a colleague today about blogs. He said he's starting a blog and wants to use it as a professional journal, to write about what he's learning. Our discussion made me reflect on my blog. I've used this blog for a lot of different purposes, it seems. Somewhere in this shuffle, I seemed to have forgotten its original purpose: "web log," or journal. Blogs today are too often focused on specific "brands." They "target" specific...
In Buying Power of Persons with Disabilities, Karl Grove carefully analyzes statistics about the number of users who need your site to be accessible. Despite noting that some of the statistics could be overinflated, he still advocates for accessibility: In some cases, persons with disabilities which require an accessible site can amount to 7-10% of your potential visitors. Can you afford to lose 7-10% of your website's visitors? Or, put a...
Larry Kunz The following is a guest post by Larry Kunz, a consultant with Systems Documentation, Inc. (SDI) Global Solutions. Writing a professional blog—whether you do it under your own name as Tom does, or under a company's banner as I do—is about building a brand. By brand I mean the personality that you want to project. Just as companies have brands in the marketplace, individuals have brands in the professional communities they inha...
According to Kindle Author, Craig Stone was a promising young novelist who, at 23, had some book deals and appeared to be on the brink of becoming the next big writer when, for whatever reason, the book deals fell through. Facing financial difficulty, he took up a job at a well-known company and lived the office life until one day he snapped. He writes, I quit my decent job in the city working for a pretty famous company, left my home an...
In Designing Search, Greg Nudelman explains that one of the most overlooked places to help users who can't find information is the page that appears when no search results are found. Greg writes, After the system indicates that the no search results condition occurred, it must now help the customer recover. Whenever you display a no search results page, always provide a helpful way forward to get your customer back on track as quickly as ...
