Last week my wife, Shannon, showed me a couple hilarious Xtranormal videos. The first is So, you want to be a lawyer? And then, So, you want to get a PhD in the humanities? After watching these two, I couldn't help but think of a scenario for technical writers. The following is a conversation I'm calling, "I need your help with some documentation." The project manager represents a compilation of all the crazy things project managers have ...
Recently I wrote a wiki page listing all the benefits of installing Internet access in LDS meetinghouses. After I published my list, I realized the page was text heavy -- so much that it looked uninviting and intimidating, even though the content itself was good. You can view the avalanche of text here. I like to think that text lays the foundation for graphics that will later follow. After all, you can't create a graphic without knowing ...
Last week one of my followers tweeted, "Again, I find myself disagreeing, to a degree, with @tomjohnson." It was actually a retweet, so someone else was agreeing that they also disagreed with me. I know my posts on content strategy had a lot of people disagreeing. First I said content strategy should focus on why help fails. Then I followed that up to say much of content strategy is meaningless semantics. Before that, I said tech writing ...
Kartik asks, I have trouble explaining people of the value adds, and measurable differences, and advantages of technical writing. Is there a case study, white paper or any other doc that statistically shows the ROI of technical documentation? This is a collaborative post, so if you have an insight to help Kartik answer this question, please add it in the comments.
In the ongoing discussions about content strategy, one recurring idea keeps emerging: strategy versus tactics. The key differentiator between content strategy and technical writing is strategy. The content strategist develops a strategy; the technical writer carries out tactics to fulfill the strategy. The general develops the battle strategy, the troops carry out the necessary maneuvers to realize that strategy. Which is more valuable: s...
Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...
Listen here: This is a presentation I gave at BYU Idaho last week to students interested in entering professional writing. For the accompanying slides, see this post. For the overall question I was trying to tackle, see Students Contemplate Whether a Technical Writing Career Will Be Fulfilling.
While on my trip to BYU Idaho last week, I had an epiphany about why tech comm will always be the career path of last resort for students. As you recall, one of my desires was to open students up to the possibility of a career in tech comm, not as a sellout/fallback career, or a career of last resort, but one that they would actively seek and strive for because of the multifaceted appeal of the technical communication career itself. When ...
Last week I was at a writing conference at BYU Idaho and had some interesting thoughts about the academia, as I often do when I'm in a university setting. In one conversation with a faculty member, I mentioned how great it would be to have access to a university library's online journal databases, so that I could find more scholarly material about tech comm outside of the Technical Communication Journal and Intercom, looking in journals s...
Tomorrow I'm driving up to BYU Idaho to give a presentation titled "Technical Communication Careers: Getting Started and Finding Your Niche." It's part of their annual Pre-Professional Writing Conference for English and professional writing students. I like to go because I have an old colleague up there who teaches English (we spent 2 years in Egypt teaching at The American University in Cairo), and it's always fun to visit with him. Bel...
Today I have a guest post on the Firehead blog, run by CJ Walker. It's called Finding a Content Strategy for your Blog. Here's an excerpt: To have a successful blog, you have to push out content on a regular basis – several posts a week, if not more. Not only do you need frequency of content, but also consistency in the topic. Basically, you have to pick a focus for your blog and stick with it every week. Read more ...
To find good content online, I find that I'm going less and less to Google Reader and more to sources like Paper.li, an automated content curation tool that filters out some of the content noise. The problem with Google Reader is lack of content curation. You get a ton of noise, regardless of how fine-tuned your list of feeds are. With tools such as paper.li, which rank the most shared links on Twitter (based on a user's followers, a hash...
Listen here: In the barrage of information created by all the social media channels, how can you find relevant content? How can you move past forms of noise to actually produce content that engages users? What forms of social media do students respond to the most? These are some of the questions we explored in a presentation I gave to Brigham Young University Provo students earlier this week. This podcast is a recordin...
Listen here: Download the PowerPoint (PPTX) PowerPoint in Zip file (in case you have trouble with the above) A while ago, our chapter held a half-day eLearning event, and I presented a version of my Developing a Personal Voice in Audio presentation (similar to what I presented at the STC Summit in Dallas). The recording has been sitting on my hard drive for a while, and I thought I'd finally release it. I've also inclu...
I stumbled across an essay called The Rhetoric of Text Design in Technical Communication, by Charles Kostelnick, a professor at Iowa State University, that discusses the meaning encoded in the visual arrangement of information. Kostelnick writes, We see documents before we read them: this initial encouter evokes an aesthetic response but one with immediate practical consequences. Since seeing precedes reading, the reader's first glance in...
