Why My Titles Suck
Last week I wrote a post on why people have few nice things to say about their CMS. I titled it Content Management and the Problem of Scale. That title sucks. I mean really, who but a handful of...
View ArticleApproximation, Correction, and Tech Comm
At the Battle of Balaclava, an order reached a brigade of light cavalry to take the Russian guns. The general who sent the order was referring to a small artillery position that had been abandoned. But...
View ArticleCharacteristics of EPPO Topics: Stay on One Level
This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Characteristics of an EPPO topicOne of the less obvious but more important characteristics of an Every Page is Page One topic is that it stays on one level. As...
View ArticleTechnical Communication is Not a Commodity
The latest attempt by the STC to promote a certification program for technical communications prompts the thought that technical communication is not a commodity. What does it mean to say that a...
View ArticleTech Comm’s Place in the Choir
All God’s creatures got a place in the choir Some sing low and some sing higher Bill Staines Traditionally, technical manuals have been written as if they were the only source of information on a...
View ArticleWant Respect? Get out of Publishing
I recently wrote the following in a comment on Tom Johnson’s blog post What Tools Do Technical Writers Use: That writers are still expected to do their own publishing strikes me as one of the tragedies...
View ArticleInterest is Fundamental to Communication
The Web continues to invent new places for tech writers to rehash old arguments. Recently I have been seeing a number of reiterations of the old debate about technical knowledge vs. writing skill on...
View ArticleWhat’s Hiding in Your TOC?
One of the defining characteristics of an Every Page is Page One topic is that it has no sequential or hierarchical relationship to other topics. There are no previous, next, or parent links in an EPPO...
View ArticleShibboleths of Technical Communication
A shibboleth is a test which separates friends from enemies, insiders from outsiders, the trustworthy from the suspect. In medieval England, it was easy to tell the nobility from the peasantry: the...
View ArticleWeb Organization is not Like Book Organization
One of the most difficult aspects of moving content to the Web is that webs are not organized like other things — books in particular. And the difference is not small. It is not that web organization...
View ArticleThe Nature of Hypertext
Hypertext means more than just text with a bunch of links in it Hypertext is something of a neglected subject these days. Everyone is talking about the Web, but nobody is talking about the class of...
View ArticleNo “Right Place” for Content
Summary: Today there is no “right place” to put information that will ensure that readers find it. Instead, we have to focus on making sure our content gets filtered in to the reader’s search. Every...
View ArticleThe Age of the Content Manager
When I started my career in tech writing, it was the age of the writer. Tech writers tended to work independently on a single book for months at a time. Better, for many, they not only got to write the...
View ArticleThe Metadata is Bigger Than the Data
It is easy to think of metadata as a few information fields that you tack onto an article when you submit it to a CMS. In this vision, metadata is something fairly small, a triviality in comparison to...
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