The perfect technical author

The perfect technical author can: act as a novice user member of the target audience of the product be an expert in understanding all aspects of the product be technically adept in the technologies needed to deliver the information to users create content in a way that is organised & repeatable, managed & sustainable, while working in… Read more »

Workshop on on career development – an approach and key skills

I’ve been asked to present a workshop at the STC TransAlpine Conference on “career development – an approach and key skills”. This will be held on 8th June in Vienna. I’m a late replacement for a speaker who has unfortunately been taken ill. We’ll look at: Future trends in technical communication – where’s it all heading… 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 »

The $110K Technical Communicator

We’ve currently got a vacancy on our books offering the highest salary we’ve seen for a senior technical author: £50K-£54K plus benefits, pension contribution etc. That’s roughly $110,000 per annum, with no healthcare fees or “co-pays” to come out of that. The catch? You need to be based (or legally entitled to work) in the… Read more »

What does single sourced content mean to readers?

Lyn Gattis kindly sent us a copy of her PhD dissertation over the Christmas break. She used some content from the Cherryleaf Web site in her dissertation, which looked into the comprehensibility of single sourced technical documents. In her dissertation, Lyn painted this scene: “Judi Greene is evaluating the capabilities of ‘CommonText’, a new single… Read more »