Here is some news on the first talk in our ‘Trends in Technical Documentation’ series. We now have two speakers: Adrian Warman of IBM UK’s User Technologies team and Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf. What will be the future for Technical Communicators if everything ‘just works’? As part of this exploration, we will consider current technology trends… Read more »
Category: Technical Authors
Technical writing in the Cloud
One of the most popular developments in computing in recent years has been the emergence of cloud-based computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). Examples of cloud-based computing include Google’s GMail: Instead of an application being installed locally on a user’s computer, it runs on a remote server, accessed via the user’s Web browser. So is technical… Read more »
Assessing writing skills – a response to “What Does It Mean to Know How to Write?”
Tom Johnson has sparked a lively debate with his blog post What Does It Mean to Write?. In the post, he wrote “It seems that writing is a spectrum skill”, providing a chart to demonstrate this: In the post’s discussion thread, a consensus seems to have been reached that you cannot define writing skills and… Read more »
Cherryleaf Technical Author survey 2011 – in words
Last month, we conducted an online survey that 226 Technical Authors completed. We also conducted some in depth interviews with UK Documentation Managers to get a better insight into the responses. Below is some feedback we received. Why user guides are not published on Web sites The main reasons we heard why user documentation was… Read more »
How important is video to Technical Authors?
Internet Psychologist Graham Jones addressed this question in his most recent weekly email. He said: Video is everywhere online. Indeed, YouTube is now the second biggest search engine, according to recent figures. When people can’t find what they want on Google, they turn instead to YouTube to find an answer, before they head off to… Read more »