If you’ve ever struggled to explain something to someone considerably less expert than yourself, you may have experienced “The curse of knowledge”. It’s a curse that technical authors resolve everyday, although they may not know they’ve been doing it. It’s a phrase that comes from a great book called “Made to Stick” by Chip and… Read more »
Category: Technical Author
Author-it 5.1 launched
From Author-it: “This update resolves a number of known issues and has several new features including: Object Variants: A flexible way of creating and maintaining different variations of a single object. Similar to versions, variants remain linked to their primary (or parent) object, however unlike versions you can have multiple variants active at any one… Read more »
Microsoft Style Guide for Windows 2007?
We received this email yesterday: Microsoft Style Guide for Windows 2007Do you know whether such a thing exists or whether you know of anything else that might help? I am updating the help for our new product and it uses a Windows 2007 ribbon style GUI but I don’t know what all the elements are… Read more »
Ten Challenges for Technical Authors in the Network Age
The Supernova 2008 conference is currently running in San Francisco – on the theme of “the Network Age”. Professor Kevin Werbach has outlined ten challenges: “In the Information Age, computers and communications networks produced a global village and astounding gains in economic productivity. The Network Age incorporates those advances into an environment where anything connects… Read more »
How do Brain Rules affect technical authors?
Yet again, a post by Garr Reynolds has made me wonder about how his advice about presenting crosses over into the world of technical authoring. Garr’s latest post is about Dr. John Medina’s book “Brain Rules“, which has 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home and school. He’s also created a slideshow about… Read more »