I thought I’d share some of the tools we use at Cherryleaf, starting with note taking. I’ve not covered audio recording tools, as we’ll probably look at those in another post. Moleskine Moleskine notebooks are a great way of taking written notes. The 13cm x 21cm size provides a decent page size, whilst being small enough to… Read more »
Cherryleaf Blog
Draftback – could it reveal how Technical Authors actually write?
James Somers is releasing an add-on for Google Docs, Draftback, that enables you to play back and analyse the creation of any Google Doc you have permission to edit. It means you can see how a writer created the document, the sections they spent time rewriting and rearranging, the elements that were pasted into the document from… Read more »
Stenography for Technical Authors?
This tweet caught my eye: Some people write at 240 *words* per minute http://t.co/aWqtrzI92i — Kas Thomas (@kasthomas) October 30, 2014 It linked to an article The 100 Year Old Trick to Writing at 240 Words Per Minute: About four years ago, stenographer Mirabai Knight came to the conclusion that stenography had been a walled… Read more »
Cherryleaf “green screen” videos
We’ve been putting together some short length videos that we can use on the Cherryleaf website. These are “quick and dirty”, three to four minute videos, shot behind in front of a green screen. One explains why technical communication is changing: Another looks at recruiting a Technical Author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJkTohd0qNg&feature=youtu.be Each video takes a couple of hours to… Read more »
Microsoft’s “No more robot speak” in action
Our post about how Microsoft is changing its writing style (Microsoft moves away from “robot speak” in its user documentation) generated a lot of interest, so I thought it might be useful to post some examples of it that we’ve spotted. These examples are from Office 365 Premium Edition.