Writing Over a Lifetime – Now to e-Raves!

Posted on January 29, 2012
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Now here’s a thought (and a little change of pace). Writing is good for the soul, including the souls of technical writers. “I’ll do it forever even when I’m not exactly sure where the story is taking me,” says John Piccarreto, who works in quality assurance for UCB Pharmaceuticals.

In addition to his day job, Piccarreto writes as a hobby and last May published his first novel, Beer Cart Girls Save the World. The tale was five years in the telling. “It has no really deep messages,” he says, “but it keeps people reading.” Piccarreto’s personal story comes to us via a feature in The Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y.

His novel is a satirical spy thriller set in Canandaigua, N.Y. (near Rochester). Britney Milazzo, who writes Piccarreto’s profile, says, “The short novel, set in Canandaigua, is about two aspiring beer cart girls who help a high-powered businessman figure out a string of different strange events after he purchased a golf course.”

“It’s designed to make you laugh and make you think,” Piccarreto says. So there you go. Ideas are all around us.

Following up on our last Insights post on writing and publishing from tablet computers, Piccarreto writes on his home computer and published his tale via Write Words, Inc., an e-book house on the Internet.

“June at Shimmering Lake Golf Club on the shore of Canandaigua Lake and the five-week beer-cart-girl certification program is in full swing. It’s a very popular program and a great way for any college girl to start her summer, but this year it could also turn out to be very dangerous…” is how the tale’s promo begins.

Now, suppose you were a technical writer in a nuclear power plant…What a setting!

“E-books are the best way to do things,” Piccarreto says. “In this day and age, everyone has an e-reader. The Internet is changing everything.”

Well, you stil need some verve and style. But a lifetime is a lot of time to develop your writing prowess, if you keep at it. “When will I write or publish another book?” Piccarreto reflects. “I can’t say, but I’ll write forever.” So ends Milazzo’s piece on him, and this admiring post, with our hearty thanks! – Doug Bedell

Expect to be Writing and Diagramming on Tablets

Posted on January 26, 2012
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Apple’s education event in New York City this month had striking implications, not only for high school and college students and their teachers, but for technical writers as well. That’s how we see it anyway.

Written and graphic communication and learning, it’s clear, are going to become increasingly tablet-based, especially iPad-based. To glean the possibilities, we invite you to watch the video on iPad learning that Apple has posted on its website. You’ll be wowed by the fluidity and currency that can be added to texts and illustrations by formatting them as idocuments. (You’ll need to use Apple’s Safari browser, though, it’s the only one the presentation plays on.)

Not only will you be impressed; over time your clients and colleagues will be expecting you to present the same clarity and timeliness in your tech documents and presentations. We’ll bet on that. Why? Because fluidity is much more inclusive and engaging in the insights and understanding it promotes. And learning at its best is a fluid and engaging process. (We’ll always remember the college professor who took us down the road with a column of knights festooned in the banners and bunting of their duchies.)

iPads are only in their early versions. But they’ve already become widely adopted in enterprises, including both corporations and the U.S. armed forces. If soldiers are being sent into the field with iPads in their packs, why won’t technical writers be expected to arrive at factories and power plants with them in their briefcases? (Our colleague, Dennis Owen, noted the inevitabilty of iPads as procedure carriers in a note at the end of our last post.)

iPads are becoming mini computers. There’s a keyboard stand available for them now, though their built-in on-screen keyboard isn’t hard to use. This post isn’t meant as a commercial for Apple, just as a presentation of some thoughts the company’s education event and our own experiences with an iPad thus far have prompted.

The challenges for technical writers are clear. You’ll need to learn the software techniques for animating drawings and diagrams – but that just means following other drawings and diagrams, your speciality. More importantly, you’ll need to think a bit differently, as a lecturer and curator rather than as “simply” a writer. – Doug Bedell

Procedure Writing for the ‘Masses’

Posted on January 9, 2012
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On ffeathers, one of the technical writing blogs we visit, a question’s been raised about whether comments should be allowed on documentation pages, from, we presume, just about anyone in an organization, and maybe customers, too. Sarah Maddox, who presides over ffeathers, is a technical writer for Atlassian, an Australian software company.

So here we have another example of the web’s ability to promote an international discussion. The question of who might have access to documentation these days becomes wider than when paper, or a personal computer file, was the medium of expression. Atlassian produces its product documentation on a wikki – it happens to produce Confluence, one of the leading wikki software packages.
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People at Work on Challenging Tasks, For Free

Posted on December 30, 2011
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How many people does it take to get a job done smartly and efficiently? Well, that depends on the job, the method applied to doing it and what’s available as an affordable level of pay or other compensation.

But suppose you have a truly massive job, like digitalizing all the world’s books. And your computers can’t recognize all the words on older, faded pages? There’s not enough affordable people power available for doing an epic piecework job like that, are there?
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Writing to a ‘Cloud’

Posted on December 12, 2011
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We’ve been accused occasionally of writing on a cloud, but writing to a cloud is something new in the annals of technical writing. The term refers, of course, to writing to an offsite server that functions as a supposedly eternal storage hub and allows ready access from anywhere to you and your colleagues or clients.

The “Cherryleaf” blog, like many other web-based scribal centers, notes that, “There are a number of reasons why a Technical Author might want to use a cloud-based application.”They’re “inexpensive, allow new authors to get integrated quickly, facilitate collaborative authoring and allow for third-party groups to log in and make minor edits.”
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Healthcare Costs Getting a Technology Monitor

Posted on December 1, 2011
Filed Under Business, Technology | 1 Comment

Now there’s even an Occupy Healthcare, for a good reason actually. U.S. health care costs have been in an unaccountable mire. That becomes increasingly evident, among other ways, as employers raise employee-paid deductibles on their health insurance plans, or shuck off coverage that’s been part of retirement packages. More and more people are getting hit with unexpected health care bills, and they’re upset.

So why can’t we even tell what the mean for health care pricing is in a given area? Good question, and it’s one that technology can help with, when it’s permitted to. MIT’s Technology Review has an article on Castlight Health in San Francisco, under an appropriate title, “Exposing the Cost of Health Care.” As its name suggests, Castlight (founded in 2008) is attempting to “cast light on the actual costs of medical care, so that people can make informed decisions.” Imagine that. Where else in the economy does consumer ignorance have such a presence, or is even permitted to exist?
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Hearing and Experiencing

Posted on November 11, 2011
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Two people I’m close to, my wife and Dennis Owen, my colleague here at Encore, now have hearing aids and today’s high-tech models, though expensive, seem capable of rendering sounds pretty well.

Like any serious technology, though, hearing aids aren’t to be trifled with. Possibly for that reason, the Best Buy stores recently removed a “hearing amplification device” (it looks like an earpiece hearing aid) from their website after only a month of sales and unhappy feedback from the audiology community. (Best Buy isn’t saying what prompted its move, the American Academy of Audiology advises.)

In any event, in surfing for information on hearing challenges and aids, I’ve come upon “Emma’s Story,” a page on a UK website on labyrinthitis, an inner ear infection. The writer describes it as an illness “where you ‘look fine,’” when you aren’t fine.
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A Young Lady Shows Where We’re Headed – But Where?

Posted on October 20, 2011
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We’re not at all inclined to write about baby pictures – usually. But take a look at this remarkable, really, video on Mashable under the heading “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work.” It shows a baby girl playfully fingering an iPad screen and making it (the content) move, and then having a frustrating time trying to make the pages of a paper magazine behave in the same way. Note how much she enjoys the one over the other.

What a revelation! Is this how kids will be expecting content to behave in the future? Probably so, and what does that augur for the fate of media as we know it? We don’t really want to contemplate that, because we don’t know yet how to do so. Lance Ulanoff, who provides the Mashable post, writes, “Isn’t it cute the way the baby keeps trying to touch, swipe and otherwise engage with the dead-tree magazine pages? Each tap might as well be a knife in traditional media’s heart.” And so it might!
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A Mac (and a Lisa) Helped Build TMI’s Safety Culture

Posted on October 9, 2011
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Along with all the tributes to Steve Jobs, and a virtually inexpressible sadness at his passing, comes a memory of the first Macintosh I encountered, and quickly came to love. At the time I worked at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station, where I was the post-accident communication manager. That was not long after Apple Computer introduced the Mac early in 1984.

We were preparing to defuel the damaged reactor core and to restart the undamaged companion reactor. Permeating all the activity at TMI in those days was a renewed commitment to quality, to absorbing the lessons of the Unit 2 accident and building a strong safety culture. Employee communication was important to that end, and helping to improve communication was the Mac’s role.
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Professor Friedman Appraises Another Nuclear Accident

Posted on October 3, 2011
Filed Under Communication, Technology | Leave a Comment

Sharon Friedman, professor of journalism and a communication stalwart at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University, has now analyzed the news coverage of the world’s three major nuclear power accidents – Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukishima this year. The coverage of TMI, she notes (dispassionate professor that she is), “was called abysmal”. It improved somewhat for Chernobyl and, with the Internet a major factor this last time, “was much more extensive and much better in many cases because of the emphasis on explanations and background information and the visual and graphics capabilities of a number of media organizations.”

Yet, in a current, magisterial article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Professor Friedman remains dismayed over the overall quality of nuclear coverage, especially on CNN (which has the most time to devote to it), and troubled by the fading presence of newspaper reporters on the “nuclear beat” (which was never large to begin with).
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