Recently, I’ve been attending lots and lots of meetings. I like talking to people, learning, brainstorming, smiling, etc. One thing that has been pretty consistent though is that people are not doing their “homework”. Teachers didn’t talk about the importance of homework in our 17+ years of schooling for nothing.
Author: admin
As technical writers, we at Shoap Technical Services feel strongly about words. We feel they hold more power when chosen carefully and used with purpose. We pride ourselves on only writing as much as needed to accurately convey a message, without allowing room for waste.
That’s why we reserve a very special type of hatred for one of those semi-universal annoyances of modern business culture: the e-mail footer disclaimer. It should come as no surprise, then, that we took great pleasure in reading this Economist article explaining exactly how pointless these are. It all boils down to the fact that most of these disclaimers are unenforceable since they seek to impose contractual obligations in a unilateral way.
So please, please, save your bandwidth and mine. Kill the disclaimers.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the different ways we organize our content when we create a document. Most of ours have the usual Table of Contents and Index. Some even have a table of Figures. I’ve even put together the odd document where we’ve been asked to include a Table of Database Entities referencing all queries where a given table was used.
Over at I’d Rather Be Writing, Tom explores some of the interesting ways that content is referenced in a hymnbook (for example, by meter for organists) and suggests a few more value-added ways to list the book’s contents.
Have you ever come up with a novel way of breaking down a documents contents?
If you’re located in the greater Atlanta area and interested in technical writing, instructional design and related fields, you might want to stop by Kennesaw State University on April 14. KSU will be hosting a free workshop on 21st-Century Trends in Publishing and Researching in Writing Studies, followed by a Q+A session on publishing processes for scholarly publications.
Both the workshop and Q+A session will be led by technical writing expert Dr. Amy Koerber, editor of the Technical Communications Quarterly journal and associate professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric in the English Department at Texas Tech University.
Registration is encouraged! For more information, check out the Georgia Writer’s Association event page at http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=i6byw7bab&oeidk=a07e3kmu416e936eea6
In technical writing (as well as other areas of life), having a smartphone on me has saved my butt on more than one occasion, and not just for looking up directions to a client site or doing some quick on-the-spot research on some byzantine technical topic that I need to understand.
Click the link below for a perfect example of why it’s important to keep your documents up to date.
http://www.ajc.com/business/delta-apologizes-for-bumping-827880.html
You can now download the PDFZilla application for free. It’s a great tool for document jockeys, writers, and other info workers who need an easy way to convert PDFs to other editable formats. Of course, as with any PDF conversion tool, your mileage may vary, but it sure beats copy-and-paste!
This free download will self-destruct on February 5th, so get it while you can.
Categories
Paying Attention to the Details
As technical writers, we notice a lot of things that other people do not. I tend to notice too much because I’m a little too detail-oriented for my own good. But this can help improve whatever product, service, etc. I am documenting.
Categories
Use Your Words!
Precise word choices are one of the hallmarks of a great technical writer. Even if you don’t have much difficulty picking the right words and phrases when expressing your own thoughts, I’m sure you’ve encountered a situation where you ran into problems interpreting a client or SME’s writing/requests/emails. Here’s some links to some of the handy reference tools that I sometimes use to help me interpret a client’s requests or find the perfect word or phrase. Hopefully these will make a difference in your writing in 2011!
I recently completed a first round of reviews for a new product demo screencast that we are creating for one of our clients. One of the comments we received was that although they had requested for the demo to be silent, the reviewers felt that adding some background music would be a major improvement.