The lone-liness of the UK Technical Author

We were looking at some of the survey results from the ISTC’s 2015 survey of technical communicators in the UK. The survey reported: 37.5% of the respondents worked as the sole technical communicator in their organisation. 76% worked in an organisation with six technical communicators or fewer. This means, in the UK, it’s harder to justify… Read more »

Explaining complicated stuff using simple words

Randall Munroe’s latest book Thing Explainer will be released tomorrow. In the book, Munroe uses line drawings and only the thousand most common words to provide simple explanations for complicated objects. It’s good practice to use words that are commonly understood. In some industries, Technical Authors have to write using only a limited list of approved words  (a “controlled… Read more »

Dates for our next advanced technical writing & new trends course

Here are the dates for our next advanced technical writing & new trends course: The next public classroom course will be held on 28th January 2016, at our training centre in central London (SW7). A live Web course, for delegates based outside the UK, will be held on 6 & 7 January 2016 (2 x 3… Read more »

Do you need DITA?

Judging by Social Media last week, there were many strong opinions at the tekom tcworld conference towards the DITA authoring standard and the associated tools. It seemed, as the philosopher Swift once said, “Haters gonna hate”, and, by inference, “Hypers gonna hype”. Eliot Kimber provided an interesting summary in a post to the DITA users group forum (Trip… Read more »