bookmark_borderA word of advice

Many years ago, when I was just starting out in Technical Communications, my boss at the time gave me a piece of advice. Every now and then it pops back into my head and, as well as allowing me a small smile, reminds me to do just what he suggested.

His advice was one word.

He didn’t explain it and, to be honest at the time I was a little befuddled. It took me a while to grasp the depth of what he was saying as, at first glance, as it is only one word it does seem very slight and somewhat obvious. Looking back now it even seems a little trite but, remembering the type of man he was, it was most certainly carefully considered and meant honestly and with compassion.

To this day, through all the different positions I’ve held in different organisations, and even into my personal life, his advice holds true. One day I hope I’ll be the type of boss he was, encouraging and enthusiastic, a real leader. Until then I continue to try and follow his advice and so far it’s served me well.

There are many circumstances in which it can be applied, whether you are at the start of a project and knee deep in planning meetings and specifications, or hurtling towards the deadline, grasping at every snippet of information that passes your way. Regardless, his single piece of advice, one simple word, holds true.

Pause.

That’s all there is to it. Don’t send that email, pause. Keen to start writing, pause. Desperate to just get the thing finished? Pause. About to finish a landmark, award winning project? Pause.

A simple word, a powerful piece of advice.

bookmark_borderDo you RSS?

Over the past year or so, as I’ve started to struggle to keep up-to-date with the multitude of websites that interest me, I’ve increasingly turned to RSS feeds to help me manage the load.

With that in mind, I’ve been compiling a list of Technical Communications feeds that I find interesting. Some are by Technical Writers, some are not, but I generally skim through the new items daily and I’ve yet to have a day when I didn’t read or find something interesting and useful.

If you have an RSS newsreader, then feel free to grab a copy of my subscriptions. If you right-click that link you should be able to download the file, and then just import it into your newsreader of choice (I prefer Google Reader).

And, of course, I’d love to know if I’m missing any. Hope you find this useful.

bookmark_borderBriefly…

… no we didn’t win the Lottery, but if we had, I’d have a year long “see the world” holiday (and I mean real world, not “luxury hotel” world.. well ok, a few luxury hotels..), then distribute as much of the money as I could, leaving enough for Louise and I to live off without having to work again (in a modest detached house).

… Twitter, Facebook and the like. These are good for blogging as those of us who still blog have a little more ‘clear space’ into which we can shout. The ‘casuals’ are moving to more immediate and easier to maintain services. Perhaps.

… September looms and the possibilty of starting an MA in Technical Communications approaches. Or do I put it off until February (takes 3 years anyway).

… tinkering with my other sites a little, a minor rebrand is on the way and will alter things here slightly.

… there is a possibility of a fairly high profile client coming my way. Wants a website, will need to be on form for that one.

… no run over the weekend as my knee is a little (tendon) tender. Will try for tonight but Mondays are never good.

… we hired a gardener! How posh are we!! OK, it’s just to cut the grass and do a little weeding but it should free us up to do the other jobs, planting, fence painting, step building, patio re-laying type stuff. Lord knows there isn’t a shortage. And that’s before we finally finish painting the hall.

… and finally, once I finish it, I will post what may well be the last “Windows” focussed techy post here. I’ve using my Mac more and more at home, and once I get a wireless keyboard and mouse for it, I can see me using it almost full-time (I’ve got it hooked up to my LCD monitor already).

… I really must stop abusing this format as it’s a terrible excuse for a blog post.

bookmark_borderSearching for focus

I’ve hit an unexpected problem with this blog, one which I didn’t think I’d hit for quite a while, if at all.

I can’t seem to find a focus.

Now, considering that this blog has the breadth of topics that the umbrella of “Technical Communications” covers that really shouldn’t be possible. But that isn’t really where I’m falling down.

I’ve long since held the belief that you don’t, ever, blog about your workplace. Confidentiality issues aside, it just doesn’t seem very professional to have a second dialogue, in a remote location, that discusses either colleagues, working practises, or general morale issues so other than some very “good day/bad day” hints, I’ve tended to steer clear of it altogether.

Which, for a blog that is centred on my professional life, makes things a little awkward.

Of course I don’t need to look too far for plenty of topics that aren’t directly related to my current employer but as there are already many blogs out there that cover general ‘tech comms’ news, it was something I deliberately veered away from.

So I now find myself searching for a focus for this blog, and until I hit upon a formula that works for me, as the writer, I’m afraid that you, dear reader, will need to put up with my tried and tested “if in doubt, blog” methodolgy. Of which this post is a shining example.

I guess it’s akin to writers block. The best way to break it is to start writing, about anything. I remember reading about one writer that, when “the block” descended on his writing, took to writing out his shopping trips in longhand. Pretty soon he was back in the flow, and found it much easier to switch back to his day job.

I do the same, although I guess blogging is a little different. At least I find one aspect of it different, namely the title of each post. I know that I can go back and add a title once I’ve finished but it’s not my habit, just yet, and so I find that a vague idea for a blog post is stated in the title but what follows, what flows when I start to type, is rarely what I thought I was going to discuss.

Ultimately I’m not searching for focus at all, I’m trying to kickstart this blog by forcing my own hand. If I keep writing the content will come, and so, I hope will something of use to anyone who reads it. It may just be that summer lull that all bloggers go through, but despite my best efforts, I’m finding posting here harder than it should/needs be.

I’ll keep bashing away at the keyboard though and hopefully things will start to take shape here. Ohh and that reminds me, there are some design changes needing done, so if things look a little wonky (or completely different) over the next couple of days, then don’t panic. It’s me, not you.

Phew. Post finished. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

bookmark_borderSkill Set

Without meaning to I seem to have taken some inspiration from this post, whilst I’m not directly offering a counterpoint, it’s worth a read.

~

Every trade or profession has a skill set, a unique set of talents that make one role different from another. For most people in the IT industry we all have some amount of ‘business-led’ skills such as time management, a little project management perhaps, and so on.

As a profession, Technical Communications covers a wide range of skills and some people, depending on their role or the company the work for, can end up being a jack of all trades (master of some?). However, there are some skills that are easily identifiable as being part of our core job and apply to most, if not all, technical writing positions, for example:

  • Writing
  • Editing
  • Indexing

After that we can look to other areas in which some technical writers dabble, either because of company need or personal curiosity, such as:

  • Graphic design
  • QA/Testing
  • Coding
  • Usability
  • Information Architecture

All of these skills are professions in their own right, and whilst I would never suggest that a technical writer could replace like for like, we do tend to inherit a few additional skills as we bumble along. The specifics and amount vary from person to person, situation to situation, and whilst that means that no two jobs are the same it does present a small quandary.

How do we come up with a generic job description for our profession?

Even if I was to limit the scope of that question to my own personal experience, having worked in 5 different software companies with each having a slightly different view of what my role should be (and with each role being developed in a different way once I had joined the company), it’s still hard to get a single, generic, job description.

This all sparks another question, why do we need a generic job description for our profession?

Well put it this way. A software developer will have a set of skills, but I’d warrant that their list of core skills far outweights the list of their secondary skills. There is an understanding that a software developer will know certain things, and that list is far longer than that of a technical writer yet we have the potential to bring so much more than ‘just writing’ to a company.

To help publicise our capabilities, and the benefits of having a dedicated technical writing team within your company, a generic job description is an ideal starting point to make sure the hiring managers of the world know what we CAN do, if given half a chance.

I know that a generic job description will never match any one role, but I imagine it like a pie chart, with each slice (skill) growing or shrinking to meet the job specification. But before we can bake that pie we need a full list of ingredients.

So, what have I missed? What other roles and skills do you bring with you to a company? Let us build our generic technical writer, we can call her Tina… (or maybe not)

bookmark_borderHandling Information Laziness

Like most people, I ‘fell’ into the world of Technical Communications. I didn’t choose this career, and like many I didn’t study anything that remotely involved writing. But then, who really knows what they want to be when they are choosing what to study at university.

So, after spending a few years learning about Electronic and Electrical Engineering, and largely finding the entire experience boring, I packed that in and somehow found myself working as a Technical Administrator for a small local software firm. My Mother had spotted the job advert in the local paper and the rest, as they say, has passed under the bridge…

Having spent some time helping out at a local community centre, creating flyers and brochures for local charities and organisations, starting work as a Technical Author was a departure into a new ‘technical’ world. I learned a lot of things in that first job but the most important things can be easily summarised and stated that as “how NOT to be a good Technical Author”. Still, no-one can say I don’t learn from my mistakes.

Fast forward many years and I find myself in the position of knowing enough about my profession to understand how it can best help the company for which I’m currently working, and being comfortable enough about the processes involved with being a Technical Author that I don’t need to worry about them on a daily basis. I can quite happily paddle along, with nary a ripple cast in my wake. Of course I strive keep up-to-date with the latest fads and fashions in the world of information access and creation, technologies and methods which are constantly on the move, but the changes to the prevalent methodologies within the Technical Communications industry (the draft and review process for example) evolve rather slowly, and I have to admit that the lack of speed of progress in these areas is a concern.

Anyone involved with the software industry will have felt the varying effects of the internet, good and bad, as it has ripped across many different areas of technology, massively changing how people think about information. We, as Technical Authors/Writers/Communicators now work with a commodity which continues to rise in value as more and more people create and manipulate, publish and expose it for everyone to use. It’s no revelation to state that the internet has brought about an ‘information boom’ and this boom means that, for those of us working in the software industry, we need to rise and meet one simple expectation.

I want it now. No, I don’t want to look it up. No, I don’t want to have to read anything. No, I’m not that interested in anything else other than solving my current problem. Now. Please. Thank You.

Not even 10 years ago the expectation was different. The expectation had some built-in tolerance, an acceptance that information may need to be found, or at least filtered, from at least one source. Maybe that expectation was taken advantage of, maybe that expectation gave us an excuse to produce a level of product documentation that was ‘good enough’, as opposed to ‘better than expected’. Maybe not.

The field of Technical Communications prides itself on making information usable. Yes, there is a focus on making sure that information is complete, and accurate, but after that there is little point in having information if what the reader wants to find is hidden away behind some weird structure or methodology with which they are unfamiliar. There are a number of ways to presenting information to the user, and some consistent methods such as a Table of Contents, or an Index being the most common. However these all require some effort and in the age of instant access I’d humbly suggest that there is one growing universal truth by which all information must abide: If I can’t Google for it, why would I bother?

Of course it’s not all bad, one technological advantage of the “Google-age” is the relative lack of work required to make your information available to the mighty search engine. Put your PDFs, web pages, or even Word documents on a website and Google will find it. Simple enough.

However, to fully leverage the advantage and properly embrace the webcentric view so many people now have of the information world, we, as a profession, need to add another string to our bow, we need to master the skill of search engine optimisation (SEO). This is no small task but, naturally, the internet is brimming with information that can help, with plenty of hints and tips to get you started.

The world of information, both creation and usage, continues to change, I wonder what other skills we will need to develop?