Advice about breaking into tech comm

Some time ago, a lab technician asked me how to go about breaking into technical communications. I’ve already replied to J privately, but I thought the issue could be of interest to you as well, so here’s J’s question and my reply, both edited for publication. J wrote me: I’ve recently become very interested in [...]

Find more tech comm blogs

If you enjoy this blog, you can find more reading like it on the list of “20 Helpful Blogs for Technical Writing Students” put together by the folks at onlinecolleges.net. The list contains many of the blogs on my own blog roll, and it’s short and concise enough so you can quickly pick up a [...]

Tech comm trends 2012, mashed up and commented

2012 is the year when tech comm’ers need to understand business processes and align documentation with new technologies, say tech comm pundits – and yours truly. What I expect for 2012 Tech comm’ers need to understand business processes. Okay, so this trend is not exactly new, but I expect it will gain traction this year. [...]

Happy New Year

I wish you a happy new year and all the best for 2012! If you’ve stopped by this blog in 2011, you’re in the good company of readers, most from the USA, Germany, Canada and the UK, but also from India, Denmark, Philippines, Australia, South Africa and Brazil – and other countries who didn’t make [...]

Top 5 tech writing posts in 2011

Here are the 5 most popular posts on Kai’s Tech Writing Blog in 2011. After my Top 3 tech comm lessons, this is the second “year in review” posts. Kai’s Tech Writing Blog takes a break now and will be back in 2012. I thank each one of you for reading and commenting; I’m happy [...]

Art vs. online: 2 dimensions of curating

Curating is a cool word, or trendy jargon, for what happens in web technologies and in art museums, but they are fundamentally different activities. In this post, I want to add an alternative view to Rachel Potts who recently wrote about “When software UX met museum curation“. Where Rachel emphasises similarities, I’d like to focus [...]

Tech comm meets content strategy, with Ray Gallon

Technical communications and content strategy have a lot to say to each other.  Bloggers have frequently related the two disciplines. Tech comm conferences run streams on content strategy, for example, tekom11 dedicated a whole day to the topic. Content strategy for software development Leave it to Scriptorium and their excellent webinars to shed some light [...]

All aboard! Onwards to structured authoring!

Our team of technical writers is embarking on a journey towards structured authoring. With 10 writers, we’ll move from an unstructured Word to PDF/CHM environment to a structured Flare to WebHelp/PDF environment. Or I should say “semi-structured”: We do have an information model based on DITA, but we won’t actually be able to enforce it [...]

When redundancy is good: Online help navigation

Redundant navigation can help users find what they’re looking for. Redundancy in documentation is usually bad: When you have the same content (in different words) in two places, you pay twice for localization – yet you probably only remember to update one of the items. So you risk inconsistencies, extra costs and general havoc. Not [...]

How (not) to use documentation checklists

Checklists can be great aids, but they won’t guarantee that you create good and complete documentation. – That’s my experience, and I’d appreciate your input whether you agree or not. The Valuable Content Checklist Content strategist Ahava Leibtag published the “essential Creating Valuable Content Checklist (TM)” last month, along with a step-by-step guide: With this [...]