My writer residency on the commuter rail In January, Amtrak announced that they were launching a writer in residence program. The internet buzzed as writers rushed to submit their applications, lured by the romance of train travel and the chance to practice their craft free from the demands of the office or the coffee shop.(…)
Jimmy Guterman, magazine writer/editor extraordinaire and rock ‘n’ roller, has a great post on his blog about the “business casual” editorial voice: Yet the metaphor works. Everyone knows what business casual means, which is a key to quick understanding. A business casual voice is serious but light, focused on ease, deliberately avoiding the stuffy. Business(…)
It’s a post that many technical writers have longed to write, and now Ellis Pratt has. Nine myths of technical writing, which Pratt blogged on his Cherryleaf site, lists nine of the more popular myths tech communicators hear about technical writing. I have no idea why “nobody reads the manuals” is listed third, instead of(…)
Gordon McLean has a great post on his blog, One Man Writes, about all the buzz around content strategy. (The post is so good, I stole its title for this post!) For many people who don’t spend a lot of time worrying about content, it seems a bit grandiose to have to have a strategy(…)
As I continue to research options for moving my organization toward a single source platform, I find myself running into the same types of hidden costs that Ruth Haworth describes in her post, The True Costs of DITA Adoption. There doesn’t seem to be an out-of-the-box solution for producing structured, reusable tech comms. The industry(…)
