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.

Writing Engaging Employee Handbooks

Posted on September 1, 2011
Filed Under Business, Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Ever been asked to write an employee handbook? That’s a special challenge because you’re writing on behalf of an organization for the people whose enthusiasm, support and creativity are vital to its success. They don’t cotton to legalese or strictures. An effective handbook needs to be more than simply a recitation of rules.  We’re talking, in effect, about technical writing with a human face.

In this context, we’ve come across a website – klariti.com – with a page on “How to Make Employee Handbooks More Human.” It’s selling an employee handbook template, but it’s modestly priced ($9.99) and might be good to have on hand. Beyond that, though, Ivan Walsh, the writer, has some pertinent tips for putting an engaging handbook together.
Read more

‘Crowdsourcing’ – the New, Bigger Water Cooler

Posted on August 28, 2011
Filed Under Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Infographics take specialized skill to design and execute, but when they’re done well, are they helpful! Here’s an example from The Content Wrangler site: an infographic on crowdsourcing.
Read more

Hanging Out With Our Futures

Posted on August 22, 2011
Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment

Our colleague Dennis Owen is on the road a lot these days and that’s especially why it would be interesting to get his thoughts on this piece by David Lang from the Make magazine blog, “Surrounding Yourself with the Right People.”

The piece takes off from a quote, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” So, it follows, be careful who you spend your time with. That makes a lot of sense in terms of whom to avoid. But is it worth being careful about who you associate with in terms of hoped-for creativity? Probably, but that’s more difficult to demonstrate, at least in the short run.

Lang reflects on his work in sailing big chartered sailboats in San Francisco Bay – a skill he’d picked up in a year and a half.
Read more

Technical Writers Who Speak, Too

Posted on July 30, 2011
Filed Under Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Technical writers may be able to get more mileage, and income, from their knowledge if they can speak it, as well as write it. The notion of speaking about technology to an audience may make some writers queasy, but Sarah Maddox found that it can go surprisingly well.

Sara is a technical writer in Australia who does “ffeathers – a technical writer’s blog.” “You could have blown me down with a feather duster if you’d told me that I would speak at a conference,” she writes. “Then I met Joe Welinske and started blabbing about my love of documentation wikis. There was probably a lot of arm waving and even a bit of in-place leaping about. Joe quickly suggested that I speak at the next WritersUA conference. I remember silence. I probably went pale. But I must have said yes, because within a few months I found myself on stage.

“To my absolute astonishment,” Sarah continues, “my presentation went reasonably well. Since then I’ve presented sessions at a few conferences, and I enjoy the experience more each time.”
Read more

Banned Chemicals Being Released From Melting Arctic Ice

Posted on July 24, 2011
Filed Under Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

Folly, sadly, gets to be repeated in nature as in life. That’s how a report in the journal Nature Climate Change struck us just now.

So be extra careful.

What we’re talking about is that pollutants known as “persistent organic pollutants,” or POPs, that were outlawed in 2001 apparently are being released in the melting of Arctic ice due to climate change.

A study released in the journal looked at atmospheric concentrations of three banned chemicals – DDT, HCH and cis-chlordane – between 1993 and 2009 at a station in Norway’s Svalbard Islands and another in the Canadian Arctic.

The study found, reports Physorg.com, “a slight rise in secondary emissions, from POPs that had been locked in Arctic ice and snow but were now being gradually released because of warming.”
Read more

As The Space Shuttle Flights End…

Posted on July 21, 2011
Filed Under Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

“Wheels stopped.” With those words this morning, Atlantis completed the final space shuttle flight and ended 30 years of U.S. orbital space flights.

It can be argued that the space flights were exorbitantly expensive and not worth the outlay. We’d disagree. Expensive, yes, but learning often has high costs. The point is the learning itself, and the experience it provides.

NASA has reason to appreciate the generosity of U.S. taxpayers, and we taxpayers have more than a little reason to be appreciative of NASA and its astronauts.

They’ve taken us into orbit, many times now, and helped provide, among other treasures, those magnificent photos of deep space from the Hubble telescope.
Read more

Keep Repetitive Learning ‘Up Front’

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

Scott Nesbitt, a technical writing colleague on the Web, raises an interesting question: How do we write manuals or procedures with steps that might involve repetitive skills or insights without bogging the reader down?

Repetition, Scott notes, is an effective way of learning but “it gets tedious quite quickly.” So how do we keep procedures from working against themselves by inflicting too much cross-referencing on the reader?

A good question. I haven’t talked with Dennis Owen about this, but he can chime in whenever he pleases.

An approach that occurs to Scott is to state something like this af the beginning of a procedure:
Read more

Another Bookish Aim for the Ages – Digital This Time

Posted on June 14, 2011
Filed Under Technology, The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

It won’t come close to matching the great Royal Library of Alexandria in elegance, and doesn’t care to. But the just-launched Physical Archive of the Internet in Richmond, CA, already has over 300,000 books on hand, well on its way to bettering the 400,000 to 700,000 parchment scrolls that were stored at Alexandria, Egypt in ancient times.

The Physical Archive of the Internet is aiming to digitalize and preserve for long-term storage “one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire” – 10 million or more items. This is a critical time for launching such an ambitious project, the archive notes, because “books are being thrown away, or sometimes packed away, as digitized versions become more available.”
Read more

Crisis Lessons That Go Unlearned

Posted on June 8, 2011
Filed Under Business, Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

Michael Coston has eclectic interests, so on his Avian Flu Diary he writes about the continuing mishandling of the communication aspects of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant accident. “When, oh when, will they ever learn?” one is prompted to ask. The question seems to hold both for the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, and Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA).

The earthquake-initiated accident was much worse than first reported, with three of the six reactors on the Fukushima Daiichi site experiencing meltdowns, and two of them possibly being melt throughs, with nuclear fuel actually “melted through the walls or floors of (the) reactor vessel.”

Yet the accident’s severity “was held at a 5 for a full month (the same as Three Mile Island), before being raised to a Chernobyl-comparable level 7 on April 11th,” Coston notes.
Read more

NASA Preparing, Ultimately, for Mars

Posted on May 26, 2011
Filed Under Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

With the space shuttle flights winding down, we’ve been wondering where NASA will be heading next. The answer is, first to an asteroid by 2025, then Mars, where they hope to arrive by the 2030s. The space agency won’t be building a brand new spaceship to get there. Instead, it will be modifying the Orion spacecraft that’s been part of the Constellation program.

Meanwhile, there will be unnmaned exploratory flights, like the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled for launching this fall, and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutionN (MAVEN) mission planned for late 2013.

NASA’s website is a fascinating place to roam all by itself. It has details of all that the space agency is planning to do, and the assistance in terms of engineering and science education needed to accomplish its space goals.

President Obama recalibrated NASA’s goals last year, with the cancellation of the Constellation program and the setting of the new asteroid and Mars goals.
Read more

« go back — keep looking »
Email Subscribe

Recently


Categories


Archives


Blogroll