Selecting the right Technical Author to recruit for your organisation

It’s been a while since we added an article to our Web site (these days we tend to post content to this blog), but we’ve just written one called Selecting the right Technical Author to recruit for your organisation. The role of the technical author (also known as Technical Writer or Information Developer) is one… Read more »

Help is broken?

Are we at the point when we need to acknowledge that classic online Help files are not working as well as they should – that is, as the primary source of information to assist users when they get stuck? This is not a Don Draper “why I’m quitting tobacco” moment, and this is not a… Read more »

Unifying conversation and instruction in business communication

One of the challenges organisations face is how to create a system that unifies all the different ways its staff communicate information. That’s because conversation (written and oral) can be very different from instructional information. For example, conversations are often reflective, insightful and repetitive, whereas instructions are typically results-driven, concise and commanding. We can see… Read more »

Turning employees’ knowledge into an asset for the organisation

In July 2010, Mark Prisk, UK Minister of State for Business and Enterprise said: As the events of the past two years have made painfully clear, we must leave behind the over reliance on financial services and support a renewal in modern manufacturing, so we are able to grasp the huge opportunities of the low carbon age…. Read more »

Building intelligence into business documents

Often business documents, such as sales proposals and annual reports, are a joint effort between various people and departments. It involves collaborative writing and incorporating existing content. For printable documents, this collaboration can make it really difficult to maintain a consistent level of quality, writing style and “look and feel”. For Technical Communicators, there’s an… Read more »