Danielle M. Villegas has just pointed us towards a five minute lightning talk by Rick Lippencott on the future of technical communication, and its value. Rick covers in five minutes a great deal of the content I covered in my 45 minute presentation at the same conference – it’s worth watching. He summarises the value… Read more »
Tag: Technical Communication
Webinar: Towards an Agile authoring methodology – learning from Lean
Agile programming has grown in popularity and it has led to new challenges for those involved in providing user assistance for those applications. So is it time for technical authors to develop an equivalent method for developing content for these projects? Is it time to develop an “Agile authoring” methodology? Also, if we want to… Read more »
New design models for providing end user Help
Ray Gallon has recently completed a series of webinars looking at new models for providing end user Help (A Cognitive Design for User Assistance). In the third webinar, Ray looked at how people learn today and he suggested a new approach for the future. He used The Common European Framework of Reference for Language‘s description of… Read more »
Where do the new trends and ideas in technical communication come from?
Sometimes we hear Technical Authors complain that the Help Authoring Tool vendors are not innovative enough. We believe that’s an unfair criticism, and that it’s unrealistic to expect the vendors to lead changes in technical communication. The new trends and ideas in technical communication need to come from other places. We have moved away from… Read more »
Is it time for a new writing style in technical communication?
While there have been huge leaps in the technology used to create and publish user documentation, it’s been quite a while since there were any serious changes to the writing style in technical communication. Here is a rough timeline for technical communications standards, according to xml.org: 1961 Quick Reader Comprehension (QRC) 1963 Hughes STOP – (Sequential Thematic… Read more »