I have changed the title and the strap-line of my blog, and you may be wondering why. Let me explain.
Conventional writing and publishing is about delivering messages from the writer to the reader: the reader’s only response is to scribble something in the margin. Marginal notes are the beginnings of a conversation, and that’s where real communication begins. Continue reading
I spent the last two days at the Congility conference, held near London, and chaired by Noz Urbina of Mekon. This event is the successor to the X-Pubs conferences held in previous years, and was all about making your content more agile (“content” plus “agility” makes “Congility”).
There was a first rate line up of speakers, including Ann Rockley, Rahel Bailie, and Don Day. There were fascinating insights and field reports from representatives of different industries, from household-name web sites to medical device manufacturers via open-source ECM vendors. The common theme was the same – how to produce better content and disseminate it more easily. There was generally one answer as well: devise the strategy that’s appropriate for your content and your company first, and then work out what technology solution you want to implement to support your goals. This message might have been a little uncomfortable for some of the technology vendors who were supporting the event as sponsors and exhibitors, but it was one that I returned to when I gave an updated version of my presentation on “Content Strategy for Everyone” in which I explained the progress that was being made with the internal content strategy project I’m involved in at my work. (I’ll publish more on that soon.) We have made great progress already, but are still a long way from deciding what, if any, new technology we need to buy.
Overall Congility was a really good event with a great atmosphere, and I am already looking forward to next year’s event to see what progress has been made.
At the beginning of February I ran a quick survey under the title “Getting your message across” in association with the UK launch of Adobe Technical Communication Suite 3. I’d like to summarise some of the results here. Continue reading
The best instructions are always written from the user’s point of view. But what does that mean? What is that point of view, and how do you reconcile that point of view with the widespread expectation amongst people who employ technical writers that a user guide needs to describe all the features in the product? Continue reading
Here’s a serious question that deserves some thought: Could you use Microsoft Word in a large-scale corporate technical publications environment, and if so, how would you do it? I know I am on record as saying that it’s not quite the right tool for the job (or words to that effect), but there are many corporate tech pubs departments that do use Microsoft Word.
From what I have heard over the years, a lot of non-tech-writing effort goes into supporting that. On its own, Microsoft Word has a reputation for being unstable and unreliable (see Farbey’s Law), and it is often criticised for being so tightly integrated with the Windows operating system that you never know whether a particular setting needs to be changed in the document, the application, the Windows Registry, or the Active Directory Group Policy. In this post I’m going to suggest what an ideal set-up for corporate tech pubs use of Microsoft Word might look like. Continue reading
I have an admission to make. I detest software release notes.
Let me be clear: I am all in favour of keeping customers informed about the latest enhancements to a product, and understand that a new software release is a great opportunity for some positive publicity. I am sure that some sort of written communication is necessary at that point, and I have no problem with a “What’s new in this version” page in the online help, for example. But as soon as you start calling your customer-facing announcement “Release Notes”, something very bad seems to happen. Continue reading
Ivan Walsh recently published an article called How Much Does It Cost To Write a User Guide? Like all Ivan’s articles this was very clear and sensible piece, and it explained all the different factors involved in determining the price that an independent consultant like Ivan would charge for a technical writing project. As I spent several years as an independent consultant myself, the territory covered by this article was very familiar to me. But I think that this is the wrong question to ask. Continue reading
The London Tech Writers Group have a social evening on January 6th, and the ISTC has a guest lecture from David Farkas on January 27th. Read on for details Continue reading
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David Farbey, Technical Writer
Technical Communication and Information Design
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I've been listed by MindTouch as one of the top 25 Most Influential Tech Comm Bloggers for 2010!
David Farbey's Web Site and Marginal Notes Blog, and its predecessor, the Blockhead Blog by David Farbey are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
