I was reading JoAnn Hackos article on easy DITA authoring solutions and it got me thinking about what the word “easy” means in regard to DITA or any similarly complex technology. Can an editing interface make DITA easy? Some DITA consultants that I know complain bitterly about tools that make that claim. DITA may be many… Read More »
The best job I ever had spanned the full spectrum of technical communication. In a response to a comment in a discussion related to my post Content Engineering is not Technical Writing, Scott Abel said: Who cares what tech writers do. There’s no future (read: great paying careers) in documenting things. That ship sailed a… Read More »
Several readers of my posts on revision have pointed out that content gets revised for many reasons. Peter Fournier suggest a distinction should be made between dumb and smart revision. I’ll attempt to do that here. An initial distinction between dumb revision and smart revision might be that smart revision adds value and dumb revision… Read More »
Sometimes microblogging questions require macroblogging answers. Here’s the conversation: @arh: Did @hixie really call XML a “disaster”? Is #techcomm aware of this? http://html5doctor.com/interview-with-ian-hickson-html-editor/ @mbakeranalecta: @arh XML is a disaster. Bad implementation of an essential concept. So is QWERTY. So it goes. @arh: @mbakeranalecta Generally agreed. What concerns me are the #techcomm folks who think XHTML… Read More »
I’m a fan of emerging technology, and generally tolerant of emerging terminology, but when it comes to job titles I tend to the view that if it was not mentioned in the Domesday Book, it isn’t a real job. I have, on diverse occasions, decried attempts to replace the title “technical writer” with something else,… Read More »
I was flattered that my post Technical Communication is not a Commodity was used as a catalyst for Scott Abel’s discussion with Val Swisher, Jack Molisani and Sarah O’Keefe on The Changing Face of Technical Communications, What’s Next? I had a fair amount to say in the comment stream that followed to defend my assertion that… Read More »
All God’s creatures got a place in the choir Some sing low and some sing higher Bill Staines Traditionally, technical manuals have been written as if they were the only source of information on a product. Of course, the manual was never really the only source. There have always been neighbors, friends, colleagues, retailers, user’s… Read More »
I was rereading some material in the long-running do-people-read-the-manual debate (such as Tom Johnson’s If No One Reads the Manual, That’s Okay), and it struck me that there is an assumption that people on both sides of this debate are making which deserves some scrutiny. We all assume that technical documentation operates at first hand.… Read More »