I stumbled across another great video of Michael Wesch talking about the issues facing educationalists. Many of the problems they face are the same as those faced by people involved in producing user assistance. The video is here Dubbed “the explainer” by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web… Read more »
Category: Technical Communication
The “Google or Death?” choice for technical authors
July’s edition of Science magazine includes a study that shows scientific researchers are now more inclined to get their information from the Web (specifically, “quick and dirty” searches in Google) than from specialist scientific resources. If scientists are focusing on only a tiny bit of research – the bits served up by Google – what are typical users… Read more »
Trends in technical documentation – Is technical writing broken?
Cherryleaf and Ovidius are in the early stages of organising a free seminar for the technical communication community at the Møller Centre in Cambridge. The themes for the event are likely to be future trends in technical authoring, and related to this, is technical writing broken? We’re liaising with the ISTC’s Cambridge area group on… Read more »
What should you include in your user documentation?
Technical authors are faced with limited time and resources, so they often are faced with the dilemma as to what to include and what to leave out of their user documentation. You may ask, if 80% read only 20% of the content, is there any value in documenting the rest? Technical Authors are often great… Read more »
Documentation and when things go wrong
The latest edition of the IET’s “Engineering & Technology” magazine looks at engineering disasters and, in doing so, provides food for thought regarding the role of documentation. “Hard lessons” looks at ten disasters, such as the Challenger Space Shuttle, and the reasons why these disasters can occur. Looking at the disasters, I could see some common themes:… Read more »