Category: Best practices
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Localization
This is the first fight in my series The Seven Righteous Fights. For an introduction, see The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview. Are you ever planning on selling this to someone in another country? Or someone who doesn’t speak your company’s primary language? I’ll tell you right now: Yes, you are. There’s a big wide world out there,…
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Many hands make a messy wiki
In October, I attended HydraConnect. To my relief, it was not a networking event for evil comic book characters, but rather an in-depth conference for people running the Hydra software, which is used in higher education (and other library-like places) to organize digital collections. When I walked in the first day, I didn’t even know that…
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The Cardinal Virtues? of Technical Writing
First, a disclaimer: Medium served me this article, but it’s a year old. Weird. Nonetheless, I have things to say about the content. The Virtues of Technical Writing, by a pseudonymous writer Introduction They are gleaned from a Bachelor of Science degree in Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota’s Writing Studies Department,…
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The Seven Righteous Fights: Overview
This is a series derived from my popular talk “The Seven Righteous Fights”. It’s not an exact transcript, but I think having a written form to refer people to greatly increases accessibility and gives me room to expand my thoughts in a way that is not compatible with speaking. There are seven fights that I…
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Contract additions
Last year, I signed 4 contracts for work-for-hire. I estimate that will be average-to-low going forward, but I don’t have enough data points. Every time I work with a company, I come up with something I want to remember to specify for the next time, or at least attempt to negotiate for. Summary: Work-for-hire does…
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The three documents you ACTUALLY need first
Because I work as only-writer for so much of my time, I forget that I’m not just a lone technical writer, and I’m not just an indie, but I’m in an odd category beyond that. Because no one who hires me really knows what a technical writer does, interviewing is often turned on its head…
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The New Sheriff in Town: Bringing Documentation Out of Chaos (Write the Docs, 2014)
By the time we get to mid-career, most of us have specialized, by technology, or organization type, or document type. We have a comfort zone. I have specialized in walking into chaos and creating order. I’ve done it enough times that I have a sequence of steps I follow. I imagine myself as a sheriff walking…