Clarity Produces a Rush, Whether It Survives Or Not

Posted on February 7, 2012
Filed Under Communication, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Here’s a lady who understands a prime component of good technical writing, or any writing, for that matter:

“What all the (technical writing) disciplines share in common is a need for the writer to communicate effectively within the perspective of user need from the document, and to have a strong awareness of good ways to enhance the message through visuals and good use of white space.”

The sentence, by Christine Lebednik on the Street Articles site, is a trifle awkward in terms of what a user needs from the document he or she is reading, but it gets to the two essentials of good technical writing: tight, clear expression of why the document exists (a means to a given, safe end), and ways to enhance it with illustrations and white space.

Christine isn’t in technical writing any longer. When she was, though (prior to the bursting of the IT bubble in 2001-02), she was most familiar with the fields of aviation, medical and pharmaceutical writing.

Our colleague, Dennis Owen, notes that there are many other settings in need of good technical writing. Start by looking around your house, or out the window: “IKEA furniture? Someone had to write the assembly instructions. Component stereo or flat screen TV? Someone had to create the connection and installation diagrams. Smart thermostat? Hell, mine has an entire booklet (and it’s still hard to program). Car? The owner’s manual is a serious example of technical writing. On and on…”

In short, needs for clearly expressed instructional guidance are all around us in our technologically grounded civilization, and some are met more effectively than others. (I’d like to send the writer(s) of the instructions for our videotape/DVD player/recorder, and the designers of its remote controller, to the stocks.)

In this vein, a little extra creativity doesn’t hurt now and then, though it’s often hard to get it past the ultimate editors. Dennis recalls how he once did a technical report “on nuclear plant applications of auto ID technologies: bar codes (there must be at least a dozen different symbologies), 2-D bar codes (a huge amount of information in a tiny space), RF transponders, and so on.

“We think of bar codes as being a modern invention, but in researching the topic I found the South Korean flag. Have you ever noticed the little bars on the flag?…they are bar codes! They’re called trigrams and encode a whole bunch of information about nature, virtue, family, seasons and more. (See the Wikipedia article on the South Korean flag.)

“I thought this was really cool and put an interesting historical perspective on the technology. So I wrote a sidebar in the report on the topic…boy, was I proud of how I wove this into a highly technical report. Alas, the editors cut it as being irrelevant…but at least I’ve never forgotten the topic.”

So, it’s likely, would many of the report’s readers have retained a little whimsical information if they had had the opportunity. But, in technical writing, the editors are iron-fisted.

Yet, Dennis observes, “When I write something that’s well thought out, clear, and concise I get a rush out of it. I enjoy looking back and saying, “Damn, that’s good.”

“I believe it is completely analogous to an artist stepping back from a painting and admiring how he exactly caught the essence of something.” And so it is. – Doug Bedell

Writing Over a Lifetime – Now to E-Raves!

Posted on January 29, 2012
Filed Under Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

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.
Read more

Expect to be Writing and Diagramming on Tablets

Posted on January 26, 2012
Filed Under Business, Communication, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

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.)
Read more

Procedure Writing for the ‘Masses’

Posted on January 9, 2012
Filed Under Communication, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

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.
Read more

People at Work on Challenging Tasks, For Free

Posted on December 30, 2011
Filed Under Business, Communication, Technology | Leave a Comment

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?
Read more

Writing to a ‘Cloud’

Posted on December 12, 2011
Filed Under Communication, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

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.”
Read more

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?
Read more

Hearing and Experiencing

Posted on November 11, 2011
Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment

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.
Read more

A Young Lady Shows Where We’re Headed – But Where?

Posted on October 20, 2011
Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment

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!
Read more

A Mac (and a Lisa) Helped Build TMI’s Safety Culture

Posted on October 9, 2011
Filed Under Communication, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

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.
Read more

« go back — keep looking »
Email Subscribe

Recently


Categories


Archives


Blogroll