New article on Gizmag.com
My first article is posted on Gizmag.com, the online technology magazine. You can check it out here.
Blog
Write your next manual in PowerPoint
There’s a great post on the DMN Communications blog about a new book from O’Reilly Media called The Twitter Book. The book, by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein, was written entirely using PowerPoint. As Scott at DMN puts it: So what does this have to do with tech comm? A lot, believe it or not.(…)
Context-sensitive help?
Here’s a cool picture from the IEEE’s 125th anniversary photo stream on Flickr. What are those people doing? It looks like they’re reading. What are they reading… wait are those manuals? Printed manuals! How old is this picture anyway?
Happy Birthday IEEE!
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) turns 125 years old this month, and I want to give a shout out to the organization that has been a big part of my career as a tech writer. The IEEE sets the standard for, well, standards. According to the IEEE they publish about 30 percent(…)
Training for tech writers
I just rediscovered John Hewitt’s excellent PoeWar blog, and I found a great article about trainers as a powerful resource for tech writers. If you want help creating documentation, get to know the trainers. I am frequently amazed at how little communication some companies have between the training and the documentation departments. In many cases,(…)
Tech Twittering?
The microblogging service Twitter is experiencing monster growth. It’s great for keeping in touch with your friends and fans, but does it have any use in tech writing? Paul Pehrson discusses this in his recent blog post, “Twitter and Tech Communication“: I’ve seen several Flare users get product support from MadCap employees using Twitter, and(…)