2014’s Top 50 most influential Techcomm experts

Mindtouch has published its latest (2014) list of most influential Techcomm experts, and, once again, Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf is ranked as the highest ranked technical communications professional outside of the USA. Little Bird measures  the popularity and frequency of people’s blog posts, tweets and activities on sites like Facebook and YouTube, so this is a… Read more »

Topic-based authoring: The undiscovered country

Many software companies, when they start out, provide user documentation as downloadable PDFs or as web pages. As they develop more products and versions, and as they expand into countries that use different English spellings, the amount of documents can grow until it becomes hard to keep all of these documents up to date. It’s at… Read more »

The conversation confusion in technical communication

We noticed last week a few tweets in our Twitter stream about how technical documentation and user assistance will be turning into a conversation. A dictionary definition of conversation is: 1. The spoken exchange of thoughts, opinions, and feelings; talk. 2. An informal discussion.   Informal, verbal, interactive, spontaneous communication is quite different from pretty much all forms… Read more »

Getting information from Subject Matter Experts

Interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are some of the most useful sources for Technical Authors when they are gathering information about a product or procedure. This often involves asking a developer or departmental manager a series of questions focused on the types of questions end users are likely to ask. Interviewing is one of… Read more »