Technical writing builds trust in your organisation

I spoke at, and attended, the Content Strategy Applied 2017 conference last week. One of the keynote speakers, Madi Weland Solomon, explored what the impact of content has on users, and the trends that will inform content strategy in the near future. She said one of the key challenges for organisations will be dealing with the loss… Read more »

How old are your readers?

In his newsletter last week, internet psychologist Graham Jones  mentioned research that had looked into what makes some web content more shareable than others. The researchers had analysed articles on Medium, and found there were several key factors. One was the length of the content – around 1,800 words ( approximately 7 minutes reading time). Another was… Read more »

Review: Modern Technical Writing by Andrew Etter

Andrew Etter has written a short, Kindle ebook called “Modern Technical Writing: An Introduction to Software Documentation“. The book is Andrew’s personal view of technical communication, based on his experience of being a technical communicator in Silicon Valley. It neatly describes the “Docs-like-code” approach to technical writing, and it challenges the impulse to write about everything…. Read more »

New note-taking methods for technical communicators

Note-taking is an important part of a technical communication process. A typical project can move from the account manager to the project manager, and then onto the technical communicator.  Sharing information gathered at client meetings with project team members is often done through internal meetings and phone calls, handover documents written in Word, and other related… Read more »

Policies and procedures as an API

Here’s a trend that didn’t make our list of predictions for 2017 – having company policies and procedures accessible via an Application Programming Interface (API). API is a term used to describe mechanisms that allow an application to access data or functionality provided by another application, system or service. For example, if your policies and procedures were… Read more »