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.

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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Bill Bryson’s ‘Manual’ on Creation

Posted on September 14, 2012
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We’ve always been pleased to have Bill Bryson’s 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, in our library, and now we intend to set about reading it cover-to-cover. That resolve comes after revisiting Bryson’s engaging treatment of “The Reverend Evans’s Universe” near the book’s start.

You won’t find a more engaging introduction to the truly awesome death of supernovae far out, very fortunately, in the universe. Nor will you find many other places (including, however, the works of John McPhee) that offer such helpful clues to engaging technical writing. That’s right, technical writing can be at least somewhat engaging, without ceasing to be accurate, informative and helpful.
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Your Aim: Enlightenment, Not Punishment

Posted on August 28, 2012
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We were browsing the web for ideas and came upon a post on the Accidental Remediation blog by Short Geologist. All we can discover about Short Geologist is that she’s a woman, but from her post anyway, a wise one.

SG has “a mania for clear, concise technical writing.” How do you get to that exalted state – a producer of clear, concise technical writing? Remember one thing, SG advises: “This isn’t high school, where you’re trying to pad your 11th-hour essay to fit the word count. Nobody cares how big your words are – and if they’re too big, perhaps it’s time to abbreviate. Remember, you’re writing to communicate, not punish the reader!”
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Automate Your Writing? Not Really, but Here’s a Useful Indicator

Posted on August 16, 2012
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Here’s a throwback to awareness in the present that technical writers – indeed, anyone who writes seriously – might appreciate. Wiley Brooks on the Business2Community site reminds us of Rudolf Flesch’s algorithm-based readable writing tool. Drop in a body of text, press the button and get your score for clear writing. Wow!

Flesch, Brooks notes, was a lawyer and refugee from Nazi Germany who “earned a Ph.D. in English at Columbia University, and then became a prominent professor there.” He’s pictured here.
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A Writing Blogger Who Has It Right

Posted on July 13, 2012
Filed Under Communication, Technology, The Writing Life, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Friday the 13th has turned out to be my lucky day, in a tradesman’s sense, at least. I’ve just come upon John Graham-Cumming’s blog on technical writing and it’s great to have discovered a kindred spirit who reaffirms what little I thought I knew about writing.  To the fullest.

Graham-Cumming is a British computer programmer and writer. His pointers are right on the mark: Practice, Read, Listen to Editors, Think about writing, Think about the reader, Plan and Dream. That’s it, and it’s plenty.

Writing is a discipline, but a hazy one. There are explicit things to do, yet inspiration comes first, and that’s where the dreaming comes in. Technical writers have it over their more creative colleagues in this respect, because their material is relatively “dictated,” it’s permissible parameters are clearer. Yet writing well always involves reflection and rededication, whatever the subject assignment. Hence the dreaming factor.
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Aatish Bhatia: A Young Chronicler of Science

Posted on July 10, 2012
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Just as blogs are providing new outlets for journalism so, too, are they producing a new generation of science writers. We’ve come upon one of them, Aatish Bhatia, creator of the blog Empirical Zeal, and he’s someone to follow. It’s a gift to explain complex material clearly and colorfully, and Aatish has that gift. Here, he’s featured by Scientific American. 

Even when he’s not writing about colors, as he is in his post “Crayola-fication of the World: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains,” he’s writing colorfully and clearly, as in “What it feels like for a sperm, or how to get around when you are really, really small.”

Aatish says his gift for chronicling science comes from growing up in a home where his father is a journalist and his mother a writer. “To a large extent,” he adds, “my interest in science grew from reading popular science.”  For how many others of us has that been true?

His “gateway book” was Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. “It made my eighth-grade self realize that interesting people actually chose science as a career. That opened the door to a lot of other popular science authors. It became a bit of an obsession but to a large extent, these books guided my career interests.”
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Communicating From a Kitchen Table

Posted on June 27, 2012
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It’s amazing how resourceful people can be in this ready-access virtual world with all the Internet-related tools at our disposal. Claire Broadley, of Leeds, England, explains on The Huffington Post how she runs her technical writing/web development business, Red Robot Media, virtually from her kitchen table.

Claire recommends using the cloud as a virtual office and storage space. That certainly frees up kitchen space for tasks having more directly to do with survival. Then Claire uses Teamwork web-based project management software.

At Encore, we typically use clients’ office space, so kitchen countertops aren’t an issue for us. But, we have to cheer on a competitor who makes such resourceful use of the space available to her. We’re living in a keyboard-prompted world, and the keyboards – battery-powered or not, portable or not – are becoming so readily available that  they’re leading to debates, as in our last post, about whether we even need to learn handwriting anymore. (We think we do.)
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Cursive Writing on the Brink of Extinction?

Posted on June 25, 2012
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This post isn’t about technical writing. It’s about writing plain and simple – handwriting, indeed, cursive writing. Cursive writing is under attack in our digital age, this coverage from South Carolina being the latest example we’ve seen.

Since, the argument goes, practically everything is typed, emailed or texted these days, what’s the point of having kids tediously learn handwriting? Well, what about those moments when a keyboard – full-, iPad-, or pocket-sized – may simply not be at hand, or when your signature is required, or when you may want to make a more personal impression?

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