After many years of blogging, and consistent with my desire to move toward retirement, we have ended the Insights blog. Thanks to Doug Bedell for his years of blog support.

An Online Tech Writing Hangout

Posted on February 13, 2013
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Here’s a promising site for technical writers to hang out on and perhaps enhance their skills – TechWhirl, at its Technical Writing tab. Its headings include Education Center, Upcoming Events, Industry News and Tech Writer Today Articles. There are also links to Content Management Industry, Technical Writing, Content Management Systems and Content Production.

TechWhirl looks like a site for keeping current with what’s going on in the technical writing and content management world. – Doug Bedell

You Can’t Say Much With the Most Used Words

Posted on February 4, 2013
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Technical writers are always being urged to take the time to be clearly understood. And that’s a noble aim. But if it should mean writing only in the most commonly used words, the first thousand of them, no more, it probably can’t be done. “Thousand,” itself, is not one of the “ten hundred most common words.” How do we know that, what kind of quirky excursion have we been on this time?

xkcdWell, we came upon the Up-Goer Five Text Editor. Phys.org notes that it’s been written by Theo Sanderson, a geneticist, after a comic strip named to describe the Saturn V rocket (“rocket” isn’t one of the ten-hundred words either). Having come upon the free editor, bloggers Chris Rowan and Anne Jefferson set up a Tumblr blogger page called Ten Hundred Words of Science. Phys.org advises that “they’re asking scientists to describe what they do for a living using Sanderson’s text editor. The results are thought provoking, interesting and quite often humorous.”

So give it a try yourself. The value of your effort will likely be greater appreciation for the bundling of our most common words – and how children learn by using them. We gave it a try and came up with an impromptu thumbnail essay on spartan expression:

“Well, now, here we’re going to try something that will be hard for most of you – in fact, not possible.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Writing – Technical or Otherwise

Posted on January 28, 2013
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Here’s some instructive material we’ve come across from the late Kurt Vonnegut, a great fiction writer who, herein, aims a glancing blow at newspaper reporters and technical writers, but is nonetheless instructive to us all.

vonnegut2“Newspaper reporters and technical writers,” Vonnegut (who died in 2007) wrote, “are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writing. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style….”

True enough, technical writers are providing descriptions of processes, not freer-form narratives. Yet several of Vonnegut’s “rules for great writing” seem applicable to technical writers, too.
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Technical Writing as a ‘Newsbeat’ of Old

Posted on January 8, 2013
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It struck us recently that technical writing is a lot like covering a newspaper beat, which we did many years ago. Only now you don’t need to leave your desk and computer screen. Then, you had to pop on a telephone headset or hop in you car and head for wherever your latest story might be unfolding.

imgresThese reminiscent thoughts occurred on happening upon on an article, “How to Master Technical Writing,” on the eHow website. We once covered the police beat, then the labor beat, for a big metropolitan daily. The labor beat began evolving primarily from covering labor unions to workplaces, and worklife, in general. And that’s when the parallel with technical writing becomes most apt.

“Understand proper technical writing format” goes almost without saying, but it heads eHow’s list. You need to know who you’re writing for (Point No. 2) and what their expectations are. There’s a difference between reporting for a family newspaper (which ours was) and a tabloid (the competition). You need to be clear on your readers’ expectations. Basically, we suspect, they’re involve accuracy and pertinence to workaday needs or aspirations.
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Writing To Be Read? Let’s Hope It Works

Posted on December 19, 2012
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Oh dear, an august research paper reports that, at least when it comes to computers, people don’t read their manuals. “The median proportion of the times that participants reported solving problems with computer applications by using printed manuals was 0 percent,” the paper’s authors, David G. Novick and Karen Ward, advise.

Computer users reported they were as likely to ask for someone’s help as to read even online help.

That’s hardly an endorsement of technical writing in the computer biz, at any rate. But when you think about it, computer manuals should be among the most accessible examples of technical writing.  They’re  presumably written for a mass audience. Computer users aren’t required to read their manuals, but they don’t consult them anyway. Where does that leave technical writers? If we’re not required reading, will we have any readers? And if we are required, will we be read closely enough?

The stakes can be pretty high here, even if a tech writer’s readers aren’t working in a nuclear power plant or a hospital. You want processes and procedures to be taken seriously, to be absorbed by their users. That’s a prime reason for writing them out.
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Appraising An Organization’s Communication Climate

Posted on December 7, 2012
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Here’s a writing blog I’ve come across and intend to follow – it’s by Clay Spinuzzi, a specialist in organizational communication, and is simply called “Clay Spinuzzi.” He’s got a new book on communicating in workplaces titled Topsight. (It may not be quite published yet.)

What’s so compelling about organizational communication? A lot, if the discipline is taken seriously and practiced well. Technical writers can contribute to assessing and improving the state of communication in their own organizations. That’s because good communication is a systematic discipline – it doesn’t just happen.  It requires processes and procedures, not stultifying rule books, but simple, readily understood and maintained roles and methods for communicating effectively across an organization.

Like, “Keep listening” to what an organization is saying and yielding as it goes about its daily business. Are its activities and achievements in line with its goals and objectives? That’s where good organizational communication starts. You need to have goals and objectives, as well as an organizational vision and values, to light the way.
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A Web Manual on Technical Writing

Posted on November 27, 2012
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Here’s an online e-book that could support a college-level course on technical writing – in the form of  Content Strategy 101, the book’s title. Its authors are Sarah O’Keefe and Alan S. Pringle. Sarah is the founder and Alan the director of publishing operations at Scriptorium Publishing, “a content strategy consultancy that specializes in technical content.”

It’s an act of generosity, as well as enlightened self-interest, to place an entire manual on technical writing on the web, linked section by section and chapter by chapter. There are also EPUB,  print and Kindle versions, these for sale – where the self-interest comes in most evidently.

In the book’s foreward, Ann Rockley leads off by talking about “content strategy.” “All too often,” she notes,  “content strategy is applied only to the most visible information: marketing collateral and web sites. Useful as they are, these are not the only types of content that can benefit from a rigorous application of content strategy. The information created by technical communicators—documentation—is just as important, but for a long time has received short shrift when compared to its more high-profile brethren.”

Somebody’s paying book-length heed to documentation as an engaging writing discipline.  All right! 
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Fewer Hyphens and More Woes?

Posted on November 17, 2012
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We’re going to get a little technical on this technical writing blog, but at the end of the post you’ll see that there’s a big reward for staying with us.

Subject: The hyphen.

Kimberlee Kile discussses the hyphen’s functioning by noting, first off, what a hyphen is not – it’s not a dash, like the one we just used here. A hyphen is a shorter dash, used for connecting words that belong together. A dash, a longer hyphen, you might say, is used for setting off related elements in a sentence – that is, allowing one to call attention to the other. A hyphen brings two related words together, and a dash emphasizes a longer relationship. But wait, that’s us, not Kimberlee, talking.

“A hyphen,” Kimberlee says, “mainly functions to connect compound adjectives and nouns.” Well sure, those are the sort of words that belong together. But did you know that hyphenated words are “being phased out of our language,” especially on the Internet? And that relentless hyphen-hunting resulted in the elimination of about 16,000 hyphenated words from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2007)? Now that’s hyphen-excision with a vengeance. (Maybe the editors were really trying to save paper?)
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Check Out This Internet Writing Workshop

Posted on October 23, 2012
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I’ve just come across a great online writing workshop, Writing Commons, created by Joe Moxley, an English professor at the University of South Florida. The beauty of the Internet is that you never know in roaming it when you’re going to encounter a great new resource – Writing Commons is proof of that.

The site has apparently been around for a year or so and now, as occurs with Internet utility, its use is steadily picking up – “from about 200 visitors daily to more than 1,000 daily visitors now.”

Writing Commons wants to be “the open-education home for writers.” We presume that technical writers are as welcome there as any other practitioners. In fact, we just looked a little closer and found that, “Writing Commons wants to be considered an alternative to expensive textbooks used for college courses in composition, technical writing, creative writing and poetry.” So there, technical writing is included. Once you’ve roamed the site, there will no longer be any excuses for clumsy expression of any ilk.
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No Generation Gap During Today’s Space Jump

Posted on October 14, 2012
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Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of space this afternoon demonstrated a lot of things, but one, surely, was the potential of the Internet as a real-time TV channel for the entire world. This time it was Red Bull energy drink and its space-jump team taking advantage of the new worldwide web “channel.” Who might it be in the future?

That’s a question worth considering, but there’s no ready answer, because we can’t predict the future. Yet it struck me that, at least during the brief time I checked before Baumgartner stepped into space, the usual Sunday chatter was continuing on the regular TV channels, as though they had suddenly become irrelevant. Nobody but RedBullStratos.com on the Internet was covering the space adventure live.

There a daredevil Austrian athlete was climbing to an altitude of 128,100 feet, or 24-plus miles, dangling in his capsule from a tear-dropped-shaped balloon. Anticipation kept building as Red Bull’s broadcast furnished the steadily increasing distance from Earth.

As my colleague Dennis Owen noted later, NASA served up some pretty exciting adventuring with its early space flights. But there, the astronauts remained confined to their cabins until they landed, whether on the moon or back on earth. Here, after a two-hours-plus ascent, Felix Baumgartner stepped into the sky from a platform hardly wider than a skateboard with a parachute strapped to his spacesuit. We bet NASA’s entire staff was watching from whatever computers they had at hand on a Sunday.
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