“Wierd Weird Al” Yankovic’s song about English grammar is actually quite good, and it will appeal to many Technical Authors. It’s important that someone’s message is communicated clearly, and grammar can help achieve that goal. However, the English language is always evolving. Rules change over time, and people should never be too pedantic. What do you think?
Category: Technical Communication
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 »
Technical communication as a brand
One of the tea break discussions at the Congility conference I spoke at last month was over the need to improve the awareness of technical communicators and technical communication as a profession. I suggested the profession would benefit from having (and promoting) a simple positioning statement that explains the profession as if it were a brand. This… Read more »
What would life be like if there were no instruction manuals you could read?
Illiteracy is, sadly, something that can greatly affect people’s lives. According to The Literacy Trust, less than one per cent of adults in England can be described as completely illiterate and approximately 16 per cent as “functionally illiterate”. There are various articles on the Web that indicate how people live with their illiteracy: They depend on… Read more »