I’ve just downloaded Tribes Q&A, a fan book inspired by Seth Godin’s latest book “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us”. The book talks about the basic need humans have to connect with other human beings from a social and a commercial perspective. There’s one sentence that stood out for me: Connecting people and giving… Read more »
Category: Technical Communication
Basics of Technical Authoring self-study training course page goes “live”
We’ve just uploaded the files and activated the Buy link for “Basics of Technical Authoring – a self paced, home study training course“. In other words, we can now take orders from people wanting to purchase it. This course teaches general, basic technical authoring principles and writing approaches suitable to user documents. It describes the… Read more »
The rights of the technical reader
At the Roald Dahl museum there is a poster on the wall entitled “The rights of the reader”. It’s a wonderful ten point manifesto drawn up by Daniel Pennac in his book of the same name. Unfortunately, the poster appears to be no longer available for download from the Walker books Web site, but it… Read more »
Technical authors tackle “The curse of knowledge”
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 »
User Assistance for the future: simple steps you can take today
We’ve decided our presentation at the UA Conference Europe 2008 will be on “User Assistance for the future: Simple steps you can take today”. We’ll be looking at developments which may (a) fundamentally change the expectations of users towards User Assistance and (b) change what/how technical authors deliver. We’ll be speaking on the first day… Read more »