Serial publishing is one of the oldest and newest forms of content strategy, particularly for fiction. Dickens did it. Dumas did it. Salman Rushdie and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk are signing up with Substack to serialize their next projects. I’m doing the same. I am serializing my 8th-century historical novel, The Wistful and the Good, … Read More »
When I retired from content strategy and technical communication to focus on becoming a novelist, I imagined I was leaving content strategy behind. I could not have been more wrong. A novelist today has to be a content strategist. This was not clear to me in the first couple of years when I was mostly… Read More »
Last year I posted that this blog would be undergoing a sea change as I turned a page in my career to work on fiction rather than tech comm and content strategy. Rather than starting a new blog, I thought I would take the lazy way out and change the focus of this blog to… Read More »
This blog will be undergoing a sea change. For those not familiar with the term: Full fathom five thy father lies;Of his bones are coral made;Those are pearls that were his eyes;Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange. Shakespeare, The Tempest The rich and strange part may be… Read More »
We were discussing the biggest challenges in Tech Comm at the last STC Toronto brunch and we all seemed to agree that the difficulty getting feedback on the effectiveness of the content we create is the biggest challenge. The things that really matter in technical communication is whether users can achieve their goals after finding… Read More »
Hierarchy as a form of content organization is dying. A major milestone — I want to say tombstone — in its demise is the shutdown of the Yahoo directory, which will occur at the end of the year according to an article in Ars Technica, Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organization. (Actually it… Read More »
A number of readers have asked me to write about how to design a topic type. Although it can sound complicated, especially if your bring XML schema definitions into the mix, designing a topic type is actually pretty simple. Before we begin, though, set aside all the issues around XML. XML has nothing to do with… Read More »
Don’t just try to fit into development’s agile process. Create your own lean content development process. Technical writers are increasingly finding themselves involved in the agile process of the development organization. The most common way this happens is that a writer gets assigned to the team for a sprint and is expected to produce documentation… Read More »