Approximately 50% of a Technical Author’s day is spent writing. However, when Technical Publications teams look for efficiencies, they tend to focus on the 50% of time spent on non-writing activities, such as researching, reviewing and planning. They assume the content itself cannot be written more quickly. To an extent, they are right, as the querty qwerty keyboard… Read more »
Category: Technical Writing
27 February 2015: Trends in Technical Communication training course
Cherryleaf’s Trends in Technical Communication Course – Advanced Technical Writing Techniques will be held on 27th February 2015. If you want to discover new approaches to technical writing, this one-day, hands-on advanced workshop is right for you. You’ll find out how Technical Authors in leading companies are now applying techniques from other disciplines (such as psychology, copywriting, usability… Read more »
New – Cherryleaf’s single sourcing and content reuse elearning course
Yesterday we released our latest elearning training course – single sourcing and content reuse. This online training course teaches the basic skills in single sourcing and writing content for reuse. The ten learning modules in this course contain videos of the trainer with supporting slides and images. The course includes exercises for the delegates to complete… Read more »
The four words that account for 19 minutes of a typical Technical Communicator’s day
Peter Norvig has some interesting statistics on word frequency in the English language. It turns out that four words – the, of, and, to – account for 16.94% of the words we write. In field of technical communication, Technical Authors typically spend 50% of their time writing and the rest on researching, planning etc. If… Read more »
The need for empathy in technical communication
One of the subjects Doug Kim covered in his TCUK14 presentation, on the changes to Microsoft’s user documentation, was how Microsoft now normally begins its Help topics with an empathetic statement. The writers seek to understand the user at the moment they’re reading the content. For example, if someone is reading the topic on auto save,… Read more »