I'd Rather Be Writing

Last week I attended WordCamp Utah and spoke with one of the “happiness engineers” who works at Automattic. (Automattic is the the company that provides WordPress.com and also leads development of the open-source WordPress software.) The happiness engineer, Sherri, told me about a new alternative to the Codex and WordPress.com Help for ramping up on WordPress: learn.wordpress.com. At first glance, learn.wordpress.com looks plain and somewhat un-instructive, put together by someone who … more »

Students at Missouri State University asked me some questions about technical writing as a career. To provide a balance of opinion and perspective, I opened up the questions to my Twitter followers and asked them to respond as well. What is your job title? Eileen Potter: Senior Product Content Specialist (in June I changed positions within my company, previous title was Senior Technical Writer) Richard Rabil, Jr.: Technical Writer III … more »

A career in technical writing is a sedentary, almost motionless desk job. The greater endurance you have to sit still and keep your hands on the keyboard or mouse pad, the more productive you’ll be. I am starting to miss working with my hands, and walking around. During the past few weeks, the “Mr-Fix-It” section in my brain kicked in. A while ago, I had the idea of fixing everything … more »

The call for STC Summit proposals is now open. Below are 100 Summit ridiculous proposals that were rejected in the past. They may be helpful as you prepare your own submission. 100 Mistakes I Made During My First Hour as a Technical Writer Technical Writer Versus Technical Communicator Versus Technical Author: Who Are We? Who ARE We? Robohelp Versus Flare: The Final Showdown, This Time the Matter Will Be Settled … more »

In this ongoing series on organizing content, we’ve shifted from organizing help outside the interface to organizing help inside the interface. Moving help inside the interface has many advantages, and there are plenty of best practices for style and format. But the biggest shift in perspective, which I argued in my last post, is to stop differentiating between the interface and the help content. The interface is mostly text. It … more »

In my last post, The Technical Writer as an Outsider, I argued that being an outsider to a project gives you a valuable perspective about the gaps, problems, inconsistencies, and other issues in an interface, so you can do a better job documenting it for other outsiders. After writing the post, I tried to embrace the outsider mindset and hunker down at my desk to go about my work. Working … more »

After our recent reorg, our tech writing group, now split up, has been wondering about the best way to realign ourselves in the new reporting structure, which has yet to be fully defined. Will we end up at the bottom, relegated into some lonely, forgotten corner of the org chart? Will we be grouped with the finance accountants and the secretaries? Or clumped into some other miscellaneous grouping, like a … more »

This week, after Mindtouch released its top 25 elite blogger list, most of the tech comm blogosphere was taking bows and saying congratulations and writing posts that began I’m-so-honored and wow-what-can-I-say. These posts started to make me feel a little ill, because I suppose I enjoy reading more about suffering than success, but that’s beside my point here. Reflecting on my rank, I felt an irony about it all. Apparently the … more »

For years I prided myself on single-sourcing both online help and printed guides. When I used RoboHelp, I created custom macros in Word to clean up and adjust the print formatting. With Madcap Flare, I hammered out the print styles until everything looked clean. And then I made a major mistake: I more or less single sourced the online help to the printed guide in a near 1:1 ratio. One … more »

The most compelling idea from emergence, which I explained in my previous post, is the surprising wisdom of the crowd. The guesses of 800 people about the weight of an ox at the county fair averaged out to be just one pound from the actual ox’s weight. The wisdom-of-the-crowds idea is revolutionary. Traditionally “the masses” are unintelligent compared to the elitist class or the lone genius. But now we have … more »