I am a Content Strategist
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post asking Am I a Content Strategist? In response, Sarah O’Keefe tweeted “If you’re not, then nobody is.” — which is good enough for me. The question wasn’t really...
View ArticleWide World of Tech Comm
The discussion around Larry Kunz recent blog post The Salt of the Earth raises some interesting questions about the part that those of us who call ourselves “Technical Writers” (or some cognate...
View ArticleDifferential Content Strategy
Traditionally, the content strategy for technical communications has tended to be undifferentiated. That is, organizations would define the components of a doc set: user guide, admin guide, quick...
View ArticleTech Comm’s Obsession with Novices has to Stop
Once upon a time (sometime in the 80′s) everyone in the tech business was a novice. Novice tech writers wrote for novice users about novice products created by novice developers employed by novice...
View ArticleDesert Island Docs
There is a long-running radio program on the BBC called Desert Island Discs that asks celebrities what recordings they would take with them if they were going to be stranded on a desert island. Today,...
View ArticleWe Need a New Economic Model for Tech Writing Tools
Tom Johnson’s correspondent, Sam from Canada, asks if tool vendors are not more to blame for the slow pace of change in tech comm than tech writers themselves: Hi Tom, I’ve been enjoying your posts...
View ArticleWe Must Create Mutable and Addressable Content
Sometimes microblogging questions require macroblogging answers. Here’s the conversation: @arh: Did @hixie really call XML a “disaster”? Is #techcomm aware of this?...
View ArticleWrite for people who actually read documentation
One of the biggest mistakes we make in technical communication is trying to write for every user. Sacrilege, I know, but hear me out. Many users don’t read documentation. They don’t not read...
View ArticleSolve First, Buy Afterwards
In, This Is Why It Matters if Your User Guide Is Just an Afterthought, Bill Kerschbaum posits a scenario in which a potential customer, impressed by your glossy website, downloads a trial version of...
View ArticleFewer People Read Longer Topics, and that’s Okay
Fewer people read longer topics. But it’s not something to lose sleep over, and certainly not something to shorten topics over. Tom Johnson has a recent series of posts on topic length (Does DITA...
View ArticleImproving First Run Quality
The enormous improvements in quality and productivity that have occurred in industry over the last several decades can, in large part, be attributed to a focus on improving first-run quality. In...
View ArticleRevision, Waste, and Evenness
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Improving the content creation processA couple of weeks ago, in a post titled Improving First Run Quality, I cause a kerfuffle, and some questioning of my...
View ArticleDumb vs. Smart Revision
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Improving the content creation processSeveral readers of my posts on revision have pointed out that content gets revised for many reasons. Peter Fournier suggest...
View ArticleReaders Express their Purpose in Terms of Tools and their Features
One of the samples of an EPPO topic that I included in my book was a topic from the WordPress Codex on the subject of Using Themes. One of the key properties of an EPPO topic is that it serves a...
View ArticleOptimize Your Content for Social Curation
We worry a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I suspect we don’t worry enough about Social Curation Optimization (hereby dubbed SCO). Social curation plays a large role in how people find...
View ArticleWhy content jobs are never well defined
Content jobs are never strictly defined because they are the mortar that holds the bricks of the enterprise together. I’m attending LavaCon, and here, as everywhere, content people are debating the...
View ArticleI am a Content Engineer
In the closing keynote of the 2013 LavaCon conference, Ann Rockley talked about the rising importance of content engineering in content strategy. A content engineer, Ann explained, is someone with one...
View ArticleWe Can’t Use “In Tray” Definitions for Content Roles
Everyone in the content industry seems to be trying to define their roles these days. There are a number of new roles and titles being described, and everyone wants to know where to draw the boundaries...
View ArticleDon’t Lean on Development’s Agile Process
Don’t just try to fit into development’s agile process. Create your own lean content development process. Technical writers are increasingly finding themselves involved in the agile process of the...
View ArticleThe Best Job I Ever Had
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...
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