I will never get over how someone can ask a specific question on one of my technical writing mailing lists and get a flurry of responses where Not One Person actually answers their question.

In this case, someone asked for research that supported using serif vs sans serif fonts for printed manuals because their manager said that their statement ( Read more... )

“…which in many cases means going "oh, you're the one person here who knows about this API, shall we write that down in case of marauding buses?" (Write the Docs Slack channel)

***

"You don't stop throwing punches at fascists because they're in power. You throw more punches.” (Friend of a Friend on Facebook)

Wednesday was a day of meals with friends ( Read more... )

Tuesday I was having a pretty bad attack of Imposter Syndrome, I was really doubting my ability to handle this job. I was starting to obsess about all the ways that I could fail. I’ve been particularly worried because it looks like I’m not going to be able to wade into the deep water by starting out writing user doc and then working my way up to ( Read more... )

I'm cleaning out my Google mail inbox. And there's a couple of really old e-mail threads that have been sitting around waiting for me to get around to reading them. I mean, threads that ballooned up to 50 - 80 comments overnight, and when I was at BlackOps I just didn't really have the time to wade through them. Most of that sort of thing I just ( Read more... )

This post may really only make sense if you're a Technical Writer ( Read more... )

After avoiding it all day yesterday (I was composting all the research I did on Tuesday, yeah, that's it!) I've got the first draft of my TW homework done. *whew*

Now to eat lunch, do a little more research, then give it a last proofread and send it off.

I'll be happy to have this off my To Do list.

Remember my job interview back on the 15th? Well, that interview actually came with homework. After the interview the CTO asked me to do a short writing assignment. “Describe Support Vector Machines (SVM) to our users. Email me if you have any questions.”Have I been working on it like a good girl? Of course not ( Read more... )

I'm a consultant. If the client provides RoboHelp, that's what I use. Otherwise, they get Word and PDFs.

This is a direct quote from one of the dinosaur (technical) writers on one of my Very Old Fashioned mailing lists. Really? You're a technical writer and you don't own any software for technical writing more advanced than Microsoft Word? You ( Read more... )

I had lunch Friday with a former co-worker who works at the mysterious company I wrote about a week or so ago. But I think our lunch accidentally turned into an interview. At the very least, it was an information interview.

( Cut off here )