Two years ago, we wrote a number of posts, and an Adobe-sponsored whitepaper, on Agile and its effects on technical communication. This topic was picked by others, including Sarah O’Keefe and Mattias Sander, who made further suggestions. We thought it was time to revisit this topic, and expand on some of the issues raised. This is… Read more »
Category: Technical Author
What can LinkedIn tell us about the number of Technical Authors in the UK?
As there are no official statistics recording the number of people employed as Technical Authors in the UK, we have to make some educated guesses to get a sense of the size. Searching LinkedIn might provides some useful information. In LinkedIn’s advanced search page, if we search the job title field for Technical Author, LinkedIn states… Read more »
How-to books prove popular this Christmas
Although it is said “no-one reads the manual”, a look at Amazon’s list of best selling books shows that how-to books are very popular. It’s a mixture of parody Ladybird “How it works” guides, recipe books, plus this year’s surprise hit, Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. We hope you all have an… Read more »
Revisiting “How many technical writers should we have in our organisation?”
We received an email today: Having read your paper titled ‘How many technical writers should we have in our organisation?’, I was wondering if you ever did the follow up the final results from you survey as mentioned in the paper and if they are available? This refers to an article we wrote in 2003,… Read more »
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 »