Can a Technical Author be a master of more than one trade?

Technical Authors are normally seen as masters of writing user documentation, but their skills are not often applied to other areas of the business. For example, it’s usually the case our clients for software documentation are different from our procedures writing clients. However, we’re currently working for a client where we began by editing a… Read more »

Do you need DITA?

Judging by Social Media last week, there were many strong opinions at the tekom tcworld conference towards the DITA authoring standard and the associated tools. It seemed, as the philosopher Swift once said, “Haters gonna hate”, and, by inference, “Hypers gonna hype”. Eliot Kimber provided an interesting summary in a post to the DITA users group forum (Trip… Read more »

Technical communication as a brand – The CEO and the technical communicator

Since I wrote the post on Technical communication as a brand, we’ve been working on an idea we had for promoting the profession. The end result is another story, another free graphic novel you can download, called The CEO and the technical communicator. It’s published under a Creative Commons licence, so anyone can forward it on, as long as they… Read more »

Technical communication as a brand

One of the tea break discussions at the Congility conference I spoke at last month was over the need to improve the awareness of technical communicators and technical communication as a profession. I suggested the profession would benefit from having (and promoting) a simple positioning statement that explains the profession as if it were a brand. This… Read more »

Reputation Management – Can user documentation help quash rumours?

In the ‘Whispers’ episode of BBC Radio Four’s Digital Human programme, Aleks Krotoski explores how rumours spread both online and in the physical world. As an example, she looked at how two people were able to spread a rumour that a tiger was running loose in London during the 2011 riots. Hope untrue!! RT @Twiggy_Garcia: #LondonRiots… Read more »