Summary: There is a romance to technical communication, because there is a romance to all useful things. But don’t expect the romance of technical communication to be apparent to everyone. Technical communication is a romantic profession. No, really. There is a romance to any profession if you love it. But why would anyone love a… Read More »
This is another in a series responding to questions from my TC Dojo series on Bottom-up Information Architecture. Q: We are still frequently requested to deliver PDFs. What is the impact of this new way of writing when the deliverable also needs to be PDF? A: One of the things we have discovered about documentation… Read More »
An interesting article in Popular Science charts the rise and laments the fall of the manual. Instructions Not Included: What the Disappearance of the Common Manual Says About Us, traces the origins of the manual as a form of technical communication, and notes how many products now come with no manual. It draws from this dire… Read More »
One of the most enduring and most maligned topic patterns in tech comm and on the Web is the FAQ. Writers and Information Architects frequently regard the FAQ as a sign of poor organization. For best and most consistent access, they argue, information should be in its proper place in the overall site or help… Read More »
‘Any technology you use should be “Googlable”‘. These are the words of Bill Scott, VP Engineering, Merchant | Retail | Online Payments at PayPal, as reported by the amazing Sarah Maddox. (I say amazing because Sarah manages to lucidly and intelligently blog just about every conference session she attends. Having just helped cover the LavaCon conference, and… Read More »
During my recent Webinar with MadCap (recording here), I said something in response to a question that the twitterverse took to: "It's not documentation's job to repeat what the UI is saying. The UI is techcomm." Preach, @mbakeranalecta! #techcomm — Karen Mulholland (@kemulholland) August 27, 2014 After Karen tweeted it, it bounced around for quite… Read More »
There are few worse ideas in technical communication than the idea that procedures have prerequisites. There are no prerequisites. There are only steps. To illustrate: Last weekend I paid a visit to some family members who were camping at a nearby campground. They were struggling to inflate the new air mattress they had bought. The mattress… Read More »
Some technical writers are proud of the utilitarian nature of their content. This isn’t marketing, they will say, with no attempt to veil their contempt for anything that might please or persuade. The customer has already bought the product, they will explain, so there is nothing left to sell. This is wrong on a number… Read More »
It is easy to think of documentation as simply the reader’s companion, which they use when they need help with a product or service. But a lot of documentation is more than this, it is part of an industrial or institutional system. Designing and writing documentation to be part of such a system can be… Read More »
The straight path. It is an idea with immense psychological appeal to us. Every valley, Isaiah promises, shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low (Isaiah 40:4). As communicators, we naturally want to lay out a straight path for our readers. But the truth is, we lack the power to make the crooked straight… Read More »