I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Have you ever thought of tearing up your to-do list?

A couple of weeks ago I started listing all of my to-do’s in Outlook. Soon the list grew so long that I felt I would never be able to do it all. We all lead extremely busy lives. We have goals, commitments, and an almost endless amount of tasks to complete. Are there any productivity tips that work for you?

Here’s how my friends on Twitter responded:

DeeElling: Take the work and go elsewhere — a park, cafe, or any place where no one you know will interrupt you. Planes are good too!

krug95: Take down the Internet.

okeefe_scr : Stay away from Twitter.

michelleschoen: My biggest tip for being productive is creating Project Plans with milestones and deadlines. Do with both clients and partners. Read the rest of this entry »

Usability SIG Newsletter interview

I was recently interviewed by David Dick for the Usability SIG newsletter. The title of the interview is “I’d Rather Be Writing – The Man Behind the Words.” Check it out.

They also reprinted my post on Customizing Sharepoint, which has gotten more hits than I ever imagined.

Last week I made some alterations to my site’s design, but no one seemed to notice. In fact, few people have ever commented about my blog’s design at all. The same goes with the music intros for my podcasts. I can change the music each time, and no one ever responds.

In contrast, if a post has good content, I see a steady stream of comments. My experience leads me to conclude that content is about 90% important, and design is 10% important.

My colleague Ben Minson wrote a post explaining explaining a similar point. He said,

… Designers place more importance on good design than do users, while users do the opposite. I have to side with the users on this one. Outdated information alienates and frustrates users, and no amount of “good design” can make up for that. Would you say to yourself: “I want to kick my computer because the information on this site is so wrong!… But the site looks nice, so it’s not a problem.” If you believe good design is better than up-to-date information, maybe you’d better stick with a cool, soothing color scheme. (”Results of a Study about Online Experience“)

Heavy visual design (left) versus minimalistic design (right). Which do readers prefer?

Read the rest of this entry »

Whereas an announcer just reads a script, a voice-over performer imagines who he is, who he's talking to, and where.

A few weeks ago I tweeted about an interesting voice over site, and my friend Kevin, who runs the Short Cummings Audio podcast, replied that a local voice-over guru in Salt Lake, Scott Shurian, gives workshops on voice.

I wanted to improve my voice-based video tutorials, podcasts, training, and presentations, so I thought I’d check it out. Scott is a nice guy and was willing to trade a blog install/design for the cost of the workshop (which lasts several weeks).

A voice over is a voice narration from a performer whom you can’t see, who reads a script in an engaging way according to the context of the script. For example, many commercials employ voice overs from professionals.

The difference between voice-over performers and announcers, Scott says, is that voice-over performers get outside of themselves, whereas announcers merely read a script. Read the rest of this entry »

The next STC Summit will be entirely recorded and made available for free to all conference registrants.

At the next STC Summit, May 3-6 in Atlanta, Georgia, the STC will record and distribute every one of the 120+ sessions, making them available to all conference registrants for free and to others at a cost. Because this is the first time the STC has attempted to record the Summit, I asked Lloyd Tucker, STC’s Director of Education and Membership, if he could share some details about the upcoming recording.

Why did the STC decide to record all the sessions this year?

STC has been considering some type of conference recording for the last two years. We have been watching several associations and companies to see how their programs unfolded. We knew that the technology (remember those old cassette tapes?) had improved considerably, but needed to find a company that could provide more than just recording capabilities. The company we are working with has been “capturing” sessions for large conferences and companies like Microsoft for several years. Read the rest of this entry »

Dawn -- The day is just beginning!

Ever since I moved to Eagle Mountain, I’ve been carpooling with a colleague who picks me up at 5:30 a.m. This means I wake up at 4:45 a.m. to start getting ready. We roll in to work at 6:30 a.m. — long before the secretary comes in to turn on the lights.

In the early morning, I enjoy watching the sun rise slowly over the mountains. It gradually changes the dark scenery outside to gray and then blue. I’ve never been a morning person, so the daily experience of watching dawn break is somewhat new for me. Read the rest of this entry »

If you look in the sidebar of my site, you’ll see that I’ve enlarged the space and included two placeholder ads. I intentionally cleared this space to make way for companies to promote their products and services.

I’d Rather Be Writing receives approximately 1200 page views a day from technical communicators all over the world. 1500 people are subscribed to the feed alone, making it one of the most popular technical writing blogs on the Internet. (1500 people is 200 more people than the entire attendance at the last STC Summit.)

The audience for I’d Rather Be Writing is completely global in scope. For example, today Paul Pehrson, in Saudi Arabia right now training people on Flare, told me one of his Saudi students asked if he knows the “I’d Rather Be Writing guy.” I regularly receive comments from people in the United Kingdom, Malaysia, India, Canada, Australia, and Germany — many of whom are outside the main advertising venues of other U.S. conferences and publications. Read the rest of this entry »

Author-it launched a blog today. You can view it at http://author-it.com/blog.

Author-it joins the blogosphere with a stylish new WordPress blog

I had a sneak peek of the blog about a week ago and contacted Kathy Howes for an interview about it. The questions I asked her are below.

Why did you decide to start a corporate blog?

We see blogging as an essential part of an organization’s content strategy, and a great opportunity to directly interact with our clients at many different levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Jayant writes,

I am a technical writer from India. I just moved to the UK and find the scenario very different from India. Here technical writing jobs are not easy to come by – I understand this is due to the recession. I also have found my desire for technical writing waning away a bit. This could be because at my previous office, technical writing had been reduced to merely doing language edits of 500 pages in three days.

How do I rekindle my technical writing fire? Your guidance will be tonic to my current state of mind.

Your question about how to rekindle your enthusiasm is relevant to any career, but perhaps especially with technical writing. Let me reply with a story. At a previous company, one of my colleagues told me she used to be more active in the field, like me, but that her interests changed. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re starting a corporate blog, you’d be well off with a little mommy blogger training to break you in. After living with a mommy blogger, you’ll more naturally embrace transparency, skip any attempts at censorship, and become accustomed to the occasional distorted portrayal of what you say and do. These are all principles I’ve honestly learned to love from Jane.

Jane: the mommy blogger who trained me

Jane is the mommy blogger who has trained me. In case you’re unfamiliar with this term — “mommy blogger” — it refers to mothers who blog, with a focus sometimes including family, feminine topics, or simply anything really. Jane’s blog is http://whataboutmomblog.com. By following it you can discover a lot of personal details about my life.

This idea scares my brother-in-law, who doesn’t want his wife exposing personal details about him online. I used to be that way, too. I remember at one point asking Jane (notice that I call her Jane rather than “my wife”; Jane is a respectful name for a person, whereas “my wife” contextualizes her identity only in reference to me) to remove a paragraph from one of her posts that went over the privacy edge, in my opinion. She altered the paragraph a bit, but then added a footnote twice the size of the original paragraph. The footnote enlarged the issue even further. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week a student emailed me with some questions about technical writing. I didn’t have time to respond, so I forwarded the questions to the Techwr-L listserv, where 6-7 people responded. One of the responses, from Keith Hood, caught my attention. Keith unfolded what one might refer to as the “dark side of technical writing.” His response is thought-provoking, and it will make you look carefully at your projected career path. Keith is a technical writer in Texas with 18 years of experience.

What steps do you take when writing a document?

Theory: In this order -– identify and define the audience to know their needs for information, develop the requirements for what it needs to cover, work out the review/approval process, plan the structure of the document, work out a coverage plan that says what to include and the level of detail to supply, arrange to have someone else proof and edit, run the doc through the approval process, apply changes from that process, archive it.

Practice: Get told what the boss wants, find out there’s not enough time to do it right, try to throw together some kind of doc development plan in your head, find an existing document that you can use as a template and start cramming stuff into it, simultaneously run around trying to drag information from subject matter experts while you try to build a finished document from scratch, the boss reads it and sends it to the customers, the customers nitpick over it like feuding little old ladies, the boss blames you and has you rewrite it.

How do time and budget limitations affect your writing?

Read the rest of this entry »

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Duration: 55 min.

Several weeks ago I wrote about my trip to Brigham Young University-Idaho and the presentation I gave there titled “Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing.” This podcast is a recording of my presentation.

My presentation was part of the professional writing conference that BYU-Idaho puts on annually for their writing and literature students. In the presentation, I talk about a prevalent myth that many students have — that technical writing is a boring career. To combat the myth, I explore the variety of content technical writers produce, including video, diagrams and illustrations, quick reference material, wikis, online help, information architecture, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and usability.

You can view my accompanying PowerPoint presentation here. Additionally, links to the three videos I played are below:

• WordPress 2.6
• Harrymillermedia
• Commoncraft on Wikis

This is a guest post by Ryan Schmid. Ryan has worked as a Senior Technical Writer and Information Developer in St. Louis, Missouri for nine years. He has previously been published in Intercom. Contact: schmidr@gmail.com.

The August 2008 issue of Technical Communication analyzed the growing domain of virtual worlds. I contributed an article about the large amount of written text they contain. This seems surprising, given their reliance on visual and three-dimensional presentation. Even the most “action-oriented” worlds are forced to use text to express concepts such as location names, character names, and the representation of currency. They also use text for chat windows, instructions, signs, and advertisements. One must conclude that written text is an essential method of communication in these environments.

I asked Tom if he had ever explored this topic. He sent me this link.

While I can sympathize with Tom’s comments about Second Life, it’s just one of many virtual worlds. Many others in development have not yet been released. We shouldn’t condemn an entire medium and potential field of work because of one example. Second Life and other worlds like Twinity are designed to promote socialization and commerce. Others, such as Everquest II and World of Warcraft, provide deep gaming experiences. The different categories of virtual worlds are blurring as users create games within Second Life and withdraw real cash from Everquest II and its “Live Gamer” trading system.  Read the rest of this entry »

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Duration: 32 min.

Deborah (Shapiro) Hemstreet

In this podcast, I talk with Deborah (Shapiro) Hemstreet about the personalities of technical communicators, based on research she conducted as part of her masters degree. I got the idea of interviewing Deborah from on a discussion on the Techwr-L listserv about a movie called The Technical Writer. In the discussion, Deborah wrote,

I read the reviews… And it sounds to me (without having watched) that it is a caricature of the stereotypical idea of a technical writer (introverted, neurotic and a geek)… But just the reviews are enough to turn me off to the movie.

Having said that, it made me think of my own research a few years back when I was doing my MA in technical communication… My thesis was on the personality characteristics of technical communicators. It surveyed over 220 technical communicators from around the world. I used a validated personality test based on the five-factor model of personality along with a questionnaire about each person’s professional practice, and a demographics section.
Read the rest of this entry »

On the Technical Writers of India listserv, someone is trying to get his company to realize the value of technical communication by showing a humorous video on bad documentation that he can use during training. “The idea is to evoke laughter, and keep the audience engaged throughout my presentation.”

Okay, hands-down, this is the best video to show. Hat tip to Holly Harkness and Karen Shriver for finding this.