How much time do you spend working every week? I don’t mean being in the office, but actually working. You have 37.5 hours every week, but how much is actually spent doing what you’re paid to do? When I say working I mean developing real outputs (e.g. content); this includes illustrations, diagrams, publishing etc – [...]

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Do you use Posterous to update your site? I prefer to use Yahoo and Gmail to update the site rather than thru the Posterous site. Why? It’s easier to add images. You can add tags to your posts when you blog by email. Here’s how. How to add tags to Posterous blog posts 1. Click [...]

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From Shakespeare, Graham Greene, JK Rowling to Colum McAndrew, Ellis Pratt, David Farbey. All have all one thing in common – great writing! As my career started in the Baker Street, London in the 90s, I’ve always carried fond memories of my time in England. Here are some UK based technical writers you might want [...]

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I’ve started to use my social networks, such as Facebook more strategically rather than adopting a ‘shotgun approach’. In other words, I try to leverage each site by seeing the opportunities it offers and then using these. Recently, I’ve started to shift away from Facebook and moved to LinkedIn.
What does LinkedIn offer that Facebook [...]

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Q: I’m setting up a Technical Writing Dept. for a Financial Services company. What is the best style guide to start out with? We have no internal guidelines. This will need to be useful for both beginners and also more experienced tech writers
A: The benefit of adopting a style guide is that it puts guidelines [...]

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Do you like speaking in public? It’s the last thing most of us want do. So I was surprised to read how Al Gore, an experienced public speaker, reached out to Nancy Duarte to improve his public-speaking skills. Here are a few tips for the next time you have to give a presentation.
The Science of [...]

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Remember Macaulay Culkin? The child star of Home Alone peaked very early and, despite many attempts, never managed to make the same impact as an adult. Larry Kunz asks if a similar fate awaits DITA, the one-time golden child of the tech comms industry.
Larry says that last week another technical writer asserted that [...]

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Maeve asks on LinkedIn how we can use Google Wave to write technical documents. Well, the first consideration is that Google Wave is not designed as a tech authoring tool but for collaboration and ‘almost’ real-time information exchange. Saying that, it does offer many benefits if you need to plan/coordinate/review documents in a networked environment. [...]

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The first Technical Writing Newsletter of the year includes some interesting predictions on the future of technical communications, how to justify your role as a technical writer (i.e. metrics), news of Camtasia Relay’s UK Bootcamp and the results of the salary survey for technical writers in Israel.
Ten trends in technical communication for 2010 and beyondEllis [...]

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Tom Peters says, “the value of services will continue to fall” and that the only way to survive is to differentiate yourself from the competition. Is this true? How do you as a technical writer make yourself stand out from the crowd? If you don’t, what impact could this have on your career?
How to Differentiate [...]

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