Some nice feedback about Cherryleaf

We received a nice email today: “Your concept of how to run an agency to help authors as well as clients is truly inspired and I can tell you that your reputation is growing, not just in the author community but also companies. People out here are mentioning Cherryleaf in very positive terms. Most of… Read more »

New DITA Machine Industry Subcommittee

The OASIS DITA TC has formed a Machine Industry Subcommittee to promote best practices and develop a design for structured, intent-based authoring of content for the machine industry. The subcommittee will develop a top-level plan for topics and domains, DITA DTDs and schemas. It will validate designs against sample content and embed sample documents to… Read more »

Article on the Basics of Copywriting

Writing sales, marketing and advertising related text, or “copywriting”, is a foreign field to a lot of people. You need to write something that catches someone’s attention and convince to do something. Taken from our e-learning course on copywriting, Dr Alan Rae has written a short article that introduces the basics of copywriting, helping you… Read more »

What’s the future for technical documentation and technical writing?

What’s the future for technical documentation and technical writing? This is one of two themes I’ll be talking about at the ISTC conference next month. Most of the discussions in the technical writing community focus on the process, focusing on Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA XML) and ways of writing online Help. There is less… Read more »

Poor mobile phone manuals

I caught part of Radio 4’s “Word of Mouth” programme last night, where they were discussing the difficulties in understanding mobile phone user manuals. An expert was explaining what the jargon meant (the expert makes a living by helping people to work out how to understand the latest technology). You can listen to the programme… Read more »