Yesterday I wrapped up work on my new book on Structured Writing and delivered it to the publisher. There will be more work to do, of course, after the pre-publication review process is complete, but in a broad sense, the book is done. That is, the arc of the book is complete. Good books have… 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 »
Affordances, those features of a product that help you figure out how to use it, are relative. Most of the busses in the Kitchener-Waterloo region have rear doors that open when you wave your hand in front of them. The one I took downtown this morning must have been an older model because it just had… Read More »
tl;dr: We can apply engineering methods to content development, but we do not have the body of proven algorithms or known-good data to justify formal certification of communication professionals the way we have for doctors and engineers. We talk about content engineering. I call myself a content engineer sometimes. But can content really be engineered? Is… Read More »
“Hire Expert Writers,” Says Google That is the title of a post from M2Bespoke about Google’s emphasis on returning reputable content. What is an “expert writer” in this context? Many of those who have commented on it and passed it around take it to mean expertise in writing. That seems to be the interpretation that… Read More »
It is often appealing to think of technical communication as a process of answering user’s questions. The difficulty with this view is that one answer can have many questions. If you answer each of those questions, you would be providing substantially the same answer over and over again. This is very easy to see on StackOverflow,… Read More »
In our data-driven age, we tend to give short shrift to story. Story tends to get herded off into the ghetto of drama. Story is for amusement; at work we stick to data. When I wrote my last post, suggesting a switch of terminology from “content” to “story”, many people naturally interpreted story as meaning drama.… Read More »
In a recent LinkedIn discussion on “Most important competencies for technical writers,” I commented that the most important skill for technical writers was explanation, and that the ability to write and the ability to explain are not the same thing, and that the ability to explain is significantly less common that the ability to write… Read More »
It is easy to think of metadata as a few information fields that you tack onto an article when you submit it to a CMS. In this vision, metadata is something fairly small, a triviality in comparison to the content itself. The reality is just the opposite; for any piece of content or data, the… Read More »
When I started my career in tech writing, it was the age of the writer. Tech writers tended to work independently on a single book for months at a time. Better, for many, they not only got to write the book, they got to design it and shepherd it through the publication process. At the… Read More »