My post for Steyer Associates this month—Making It Easy: The Basics—offers a brief checklist on readability as part of the writing, editing, and design considerations for technical communications.
I’ve been endeavoring for a few seasons now to offer parallel discussions for fiction writing, to explore both where the two worlds intersect and how they differ. Continue reading
Penny Orwick and I completed a series of posts for Steyer Associates on peer reviews for technical documentation.
A point we both made in our example peer reviews was that the original draft content wasn’t ready for review, much less for publication. To wrap up our series, Penny suggested a checklist.
Today’s Ready for Review? A Checklist provides the basics, plus some cautionary notes about what you risk losing if you send poor docs for tech review:
Typically I link to my tech-communications blog topic with a parallel for fiction writers. But it seems like there are a lot of models out there. So this time I’ll just link again to my Checklist for Writer/Editor Collaborations.
Other topics in our “peer review tips” collection:
This article is for my peers and comrades who are technical-communications professionals that work in vendor contracting agencies, rather than working as full-time employees of a technology company.
Here in Seattle right now, you can’t innocently browse the Web, glance at your Facebook feed, or check scores in the local newspaper without a fearsome speculation jumping out to grab you:
“Layoffs of up to 5,642 Reportedly Expected”
“With Merger, Local Layoffs Are Expected”
“Will Wall Street Still Love this Company When It Lays Off 20% of Workforce?”
Then your mother or sister or best friend from college calls and asks, innocently, “Will you lose your job with all these layoffs?”
… that haven’t actually happened …
Those of us who choose to work as contract employees are always steeped in uncertainty:
What happens if this contract is cancelled?
Will this contract be renewed when it ends?
Have all contracting jobs dried up?
Let me share some manager’s experience about the issues that can affect contract works when the “permanent” supervisor’s position seems to be in jeopardy. Continue reading
My Managing Up post for Steyer Associates this month — You Get What You Measure — touches on the difficulty with most metrics for productivity and quality in technical writing. I offer ideas for how to create personal measures to increase your satisfaction as a writer, editor, or other working in the content publishing chain.
Making progress on quality goals, working toward expertise—I believe these are fundamentals for personal ambition.
Sure feels like metrics for corporate tech-comms consistently undermines those personal metrics these days, doesn’t it?
What can we do, oh noble content providers, but go forth and meet our daily word count?
My related post on metrics and productivity in fiction writing is here.
Western Washington beat its old February – April rain record. Hunkering down inside to avoid the deluge, I’ve been providing reviews for other writers or begging beta reviews of my own draft fiction.
During this damp spring spent in fiction and nonfiction reviews and editing tasks, I repeatedly provided writers and reviewers with guidelines for how to review a manuscript. The tasks of a beta review for fiction or a peer reviewer for technical communications are different from an editor’s work.
1.
My April Managing Up column for Steyer Associates is live: Lions and Tigers and Peer Review—Oh No!
Lions and Tigers etc. offers tips for 3 basic kinds of peer reviews in technical communications:
As you might imagine, Continue reading
This month’s Managing Up article for Steyer Associates—Mistakes Were Made: Yours, Mine, Theirs—focuses on what to do when you make the kind of mistake that keeps fastidious professionals awake at night. I turned in my draft file and congratulated myself for beating the submission deadline.
Then—holy cow—my next task appears:
You’ve got mail! You made a big effing mistake.
I have a new Managing Up post up for Steyer Associates that reflects on editor/writer relations in technical communications: Writer vs. Editor = Spy vs. Spy?
This time, I’m emphasizing what a manager wants to see—and yes, I’m brutal:
Read on for my specific guidelines in relation to the basic rules of collaboration: no fighting, no biting.
…and if you missed it, earlier notes on fiction writer vs. editor relations:
Is that Blood on My Manuscript? Or Are You Just Happy to Ream Me?
My post for tech-communications professionals is up today at Steyer Associates web site: Procrastinating … or Preplanning?
I propose in that piece that for professional communicators, most “procrastination” is your brain begging for more preplanning time… though that begs the question:
How is “preplanning” different from regular old planning?
It’s a question of being ready to commit.
I’ve long posited that for any tech-writing project, there’s probably 25 solutions, and you want to concentrate only on the best 3 — then pick one and commit to action.
However, that’s not always so straightforward, whether for tech-writing, fiction, or other projects. Brenda Ueland, in If You Want to Write, presents critical ideas in her chapter, “The Imagination Works Slowly and Quietly.”
Following the “slow imagination” concept, preplanning is: Continue reading
My new post on Steyer.net looks at coping with being the oldest member on your tech writing team. Here: saving you the effort of searching for the whole Lewis Carroll poem:
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”
My monthly guest post for Steyer Associates is up: 4 Rules of Thumb for Weekly Reports
This series offers insight into managers’ thinking for technical communications professionals who work as contractors — though most of the info also applies for permanent workers. Continue reading
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