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...
Content strategy is a topic more and more technical communicators are talking about. It's one of the dominant conversations in the field right now. David Farbey recently presented on Content Strategy for Everyone at Tech Comm UK. Rahel Bailie talked about Creating a Content Strategy at the Lavacon conference. Scott Abel continually talks about content strategy -- see this video series on content strategy he did with MindTouch. When I was ...
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] ...
For the past couple of years in October, I've gone up to Brigham Young University Idaho to talk to students at their professional writing conference. I'm going up there again this year. In preparation, I asked my colleague who teaches there whether students still think of technical writing as a sellout/fallback career, or whether they're more seriously preparing for an actual career in technical writing. My colleague responded: They've ch...
At the last STC Summit in Dallas, one of the most attended sessions was Don Moyer's Building Visual Explanations: Practical Advice for Writers. I was recently listening to the recording of the session. I've been feeling more and more lately that I need to develop my visual imagination. Illustrating concepts isn't difficult, Moyer said. The hard part is coming up with the idea of the illustration, the napkin sketch. The rest is just "fancy...
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] ...
Substandard wages for senior technical writers This week's question comes from Mary in New York: I am a loyal reader of your blog and have gained more from it than all the seminars and continuing ed courses I've taken--which cost me a good chunk of my salary. Recently, I've noticed a disturbing trend which I hope you might consider blogging about. I'm an experienced technical writer currently looking for work, and I've been contacted by 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] ...
This screencast addresses the concept of inheritance in CSS.
