We’re seeing an increasing demand in UK organisations looking to recruit technical communicators who can write API documentation. If you’re based in the EU, you can be kept up to date with details on these opportunities by registering as a recruitment candidate with Cherryleaf.
One of the most common questions we get asked is for advice on becoming a freelance Technical Author. To help address that question in depth, we written an ebook, which you can purchase via the Cherryleaf website.
This guide answers the key questions people have when considering a freelance career as a Technical Author. It is focused on starting out as a freelance Technical Author in the United Kingdom, and in the IT and medical equipment sectors. However, many of the sections will also be applicable to other countries and other industry sectors.
You’ll find our next public Trends in Technical Communication Workshop – Advanced Technical Writing Techniques training course is scheduled for Friday 19 July 2013. It will be held at our training centre in Westminster, central London.
If you’ve read the technical writing blogs and magazines, you’ll have noticed a growing interest in new approaches to technical communication – asking whether all of the tried-and-tested writing methods from past decades still make sense today.
In this course, you’ll find out how Technical Authors in leading companies are now applying techniques from other disciplines (such as psychology, copywriting, usability and elearning) into the information they create.
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Here are the slides the panel put together for the Adobe Day Europe discussion on “Assisting the millennial user – challenges and opportunities in the decade ahead”. We didn’t get time to cover all of the topics in the time we had available (unfortunately some of the previous speakers overran their time slots).
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A few years ago, we published some spreadsheets on the Cherryleaf website for calculating the ROI of User Assistance and single sourcing systems.
We removed the single sourcing spreadsheet a while back, but we thought it might be a good time to update and republish it.
You can change the figures online to suit your situation and you can download the spreadsheets to your computer. Let us know how the numbers turn out for you – it’s always interesting to see the ROI figures that different teams achieve.
See: ROI on Technical Documentation and Single Sourcing calculators
Last night, I saw Joel Spolsky speak at a London Enterprise Technology Meetup, held at the London School of Economics. Joel is one of the founders of Stack Overflow, a hugely popular question-and-answer website on the topic of computer programming. He also claimed in a blog post back in April 2000, no-one reads manuals (see our article If no-one reads the manual, then why bother?).
So I asked him about his thoughts on the relationship between question-and-answer sites like Stack Overflow and traditional user documentation.
Some software applications enable users to configure and customise the screens and workflow to suit their situation, so wouldn’t it be nice if the user documentation could adapt to suit each individual user’s situation?
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In yesterday’s post, How technical content on the Web is turning traditional marketing strategy on its head, we discussed the importance of technical content to today’s marketing funnel. You might be thinking, show me more evidence.