Mark Baker has published a new book called Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process. It is probably the most important book on technical communication since Anne Gentle’s Docs Like Code. In this post, we’ll look at what the book covers. We’ll also include quotations from Mark’s book and his website. About the book The book provides an overview… Read more »
Tag: DITA
How to create online Help topics that are editable by clients
In the Agile Technical Writers forum on LinkedIn, one of its members posted this question: “I need to create an contextual online help for an complex web tool (ok, that´s not that hard). The customer must be able to add some specific job instructions to this online help by himself. The customer part must not be overridden when the… 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 »
Writing troubleshooting topics
It’s a fair bet that the introduction of the new Troubleshooting information type into the DITA 1.3 technical authoring standard will affect how all Technical Authors write troubleshooting topics, regardless of whether they use DITA or not. That’s because the proposed elements for troubleshooting topics make good sense, and it offers a standardised approach to writing… Read more »
Which problems were the creators of DITA trying to solve?
We’re currently working on updating our DITA Basics training course. It’s likely we’ll offer the course as an self-study online course, a classroom course, and as a live tutor-led course delivered over the Internet. In carrying out this exercise, we realised that there was a need to answer some basic, fundamental, questions. So let’s look at some… Read more »