Reading time: < 1 min What a wonderful group of people you are, my dear readers and fellow Twitterers. I asked for some suggestions as I’m pulling together a short, internal, workshop covering some simple techniques and tips for the “non-writers” in our organisation. I received some great suggestions and a couple of excellent links and, as promised, here is…
Reading time: 2 mins How do you get started? Faced with that pristine new document, all that whitespace, what do you generally do to start writing that document? Like most companies, we have a number of people who create content in a number of different styles and formats. The main producers are, of course, the technical writing team, but…
Reading time: 3 mins Having been in a bit of a lull, I recently asked those who follow me on Twitter what I should blog about. This post is in response to a suggestion from Peter Anghelides who replied: “Blog about why you became a technical author?” Which is a good a topic as any as, like many people…
Reading time: < 1 min Better documentation lowers support calls, is a widely held assumption and one I’m hoping to prove in the coming months. With our new knowledge centre in place, and Google Analytics tracking how many people are visiting it, I’ll soon have stats for my side of the fence. Early numbers (from the past two weeks) show…
Reading time: 3 mins The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. As such, it stands to reason that two monkeys would be able to produce the same volume of…
Reading time: 2 mins How early do you get involved in a project? At the start? Part way through once the scope has been set? Or once the design has been agreed? Or do you swoop in at the end and document whatever you find? One common complaint a lot of technical writers have is that they aren’t included…