Beef up tech comm skills with free webinars

If one of your new year’s resolutions has been to improve your tech comm skills, here’s your chance. Industry experts offer several webinars in upcoming weeks to start you off. Many of them are free, so you really have no excuse! Scriptorium Scriptorium’s free webinars cover industry trends and technologies, such as: Content strategy in [...]

Alice Jane Emanuel’s “Tech Author Side Rule” at #TCUK11

Technical Communication UK 2011 is off to good start with around 100 people attending six pre-conference half-day workshops on Tuesday. Even the night before saw about 20 attendees joining the organisers to help with last-minute setup chores, not to mention drinks and dinner. On Tuesday morning, I attended Alice Jane Emanuel‘s workshop “The Tech Author [...]

Favorite tech writing dogmas

I’m usually wary of dogmas, but some just won’t go away, they assert their eternal truth in uncanny ways. I’ve recently found some new ones, so I now have four five tech writing dogmas: A new tool will not fix broken processes. No matter how cool you are as a software company, don’t build your [...]

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 [...]

Top 5 things I like about WritersUA

WritersUA is a very stimulating and inspiring conference! This year’s 19th annual conference draws 360 attendees (speakers included) which makes it the largest tech comm conference I’ve attended so far. Kudos and compliments to Joe Welinske and his whole team who simply “get it right”. Here are the top 5 things I like about WritersUA: [...]

MadCap roadshow in Long Beach

MadCap kicked of the 2011 season of roadshows on March 13 in Long Beach, CA, to coincide with the workshop day of the WritersUA conference. A full-day program offered primers on topic-based authoring and single sourcing, best (and less recommended) practices of collaborative authoring, and a passionate introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Shorter breakout [...]

Recommended video: What’s new in MadCap Flare 7

Here’s a timed summary of the “MadCap Flare V7 – What’s New Demo” and more resources that review the latest Flare release. The 55-minute video is by Mike Hamilton, VP Product Management of MadCap Software, recorded on March 3. The audio is not spectacular, but other than that it’s a lively, engaging demo. You’ll find [...]

Top 5 reasons to attend a tech comm conference

The benefits of attending a tech writing conference go way beyond learning about methods and tools. That’s why I really look forward to Writers UA next week! Most reasons are kinda obvious really. But put them all together, and they create a serious pre-conference buzz, almost like when you follow a band on tour or [...]

Organize bookmarks in folders by task

Make the most of bookmarks by sorting them by tasks. That’s the lesson I learned after months of trudging along with a looong list of bookmarks. I would add links for later reading, then randomly pick pages to read or otherwise process, and it was not working. Around New Year’s, I cleaned up the mess, [...]

Recommended read: Practice technical writing

Becoming a better tech writer requires practice. Mike Pope, tech editor at Microsoft in Seattle, has a brilliant blog post about 12 ways to practice tech writing. The catch is he means “practice” like a musician, so you learn to do stuff better than yesterday – instead of just doing the same things over and [...]