We received an email today: Having read your paper titled ‘How many technical writers should we have in our organisation?’, I was wondering if you ever did the follow up the final results from you survey as mentioned in the paper and if they are available? This refers to an article we wrote in 2003,… Read more »
Tag: research
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 »
New University of Oxford research shows surprisingly high numbers of out-of-control technology projects
Research conducted by two Oxford academics (Why Your IT Project May Be RiskierThan You Think) has suggested that the private sector has almost as much difficulty managing big software projects as the public sector. It also indicated that some types of projects have put companies’ survival at risk. Whereas government departments can experience almost permanent… Read more »
The over optimistic user
On Dara O’Brien’s Science Club (BBC 2) this week, neuroscientist Dr Tali Sharot explained “Optimism Bias”, suggesting that our brains may be hard-wired to look on the bright side. Here is her TED presentation on the Optimism Bias: Nearly everyone is optimistic they will never get divorced, and they are an above average driver, when… Read more »
What word clouds can tell you about your user guides
Someday, some clever person will do a statistical analysis of the frequency of words contained in different user guides to help us gain a better understanding of how to make the best user guide possible. In the meantime, we can use Wordle to give us a glimpse into a few user manuals. Wordle generates “word… Read more »