In the Top Gear Patagonia Special, the presenters come upon an incomplete bridge and have to construct a ramp to get their cars across. This is a great metaphor for technical communication, and, indeed, communication of all kinds: the incomplete bridge. Technical communication is often described as a bridge between the expert and the user.… Read More »
In my last post, I promised I would reveal the unifying idea that I developed for my new book on Structured Writing. This is the post. So what does it have to do with free trade? Mostly it is that I see the same pattern in discussions of free trade that I do in many… Read More »
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 »
A new XML-based content management system that is not based on DITA. Bet you didn’t see that coming. But I think it tells us something interesting about the two sides of structured writing. Tom Johnson’s recent sponsored post explains the origins of Paligo, a relatively new CCMS out of Sweden. Paligo was developed by a company… 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 »
Sam Jackson makes it look easy, but Siri and her cohorts are still pretty dumb. If experience alone does not illustrate this to your satisfaction, a recent article in the MIT Technology Review, Tougher Turing Test Exposes Chatbots’ Stupidity, shows just how low their success rate is in understanding real language. The Winograd Schema Challenge asks… 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 »
This post is in response to a Twitter conversation that started with: “Why You Shouldn’t Use “Markdown” for Documentation” by @ericholscher:https://t.co/lZYz8u0dKN@mbakeranalecta #TechComm #XML #markdown — Stefan Gentz (@stefangentz) June 3, 2016 This led to a discussion about extensibility and constraints in markup languages. Markdown is a pretty simple lightweight markup language (and popular for… 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 »
A little while back, Tom Johnson posted an article entitled Seeing things from the perspective of a learner in which he says, “The balance between knowing and not knowing is the tension that undergirds the whole profession of technical writing.”. I think that is absolutely correct. The point, after all, is to assist the reader on their… Read More »