Is it possible for Technical Authors to write content more quickly?

Approximately 50% of a Technical Author’s day is spent writing. However, when Technical Publications teams look for efficiencies, they tend to focus on the 50% of time spent on non-writing activities, such as researching, reviewing and planning. They assume the content itself cannot be written more quickly. To an extent, they are right, as the querty qwerty keyboard… Read more »

Ted Nelson on the future of text

Mike Atherton, Lead Instructor at General Assembly London, tweeted a link to a 2011interview with Ted Nelson on the future of text, document abstraction and transclusion. Ted Nelson is one of the pioneers of information technology. He has been credited as being the first person to use the words hypertext and hypermedia (although he denies this), transclusion and… Read more »

Our Webinar in August will be: From Technical Communication to Content Strategy

MadCap Software has asked me to present, as a webinar, one of my conference presentations from the  MadWorld 2014 conference – Bust a Move: From Technical Communication to Content Strategy. In this webinar, we’ll look at how technical communicators can get more involved in corporate content strategy. We’ll look at why they might want to do… Read more »

The big questions in technical communication

David Farbey wrote a semi-existentialist post on the challenges for technical communicators yesterday. I’d like to look at the issue in a different way, by looking at the big questions in technical communication today. The answers to these questions (which may be decided by people outside of the profession) are likely to affect the future… Read more »

Assessing the potential savings from single sourcing

One of the main benefits from single sourcing is the ability to reuse existing content. Different departments can avoid duplicating work, which means they can save time and money. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to quantify these savings before you move to an authoring or content management system that enables you to single source. Analysing… Read more »