It’s no secret that I have a masters degree in technical and scientific communication from Miami University. With all the hype about Web 2.0, outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and social media like wikis, an interesting question that I get asked occasionally is, “should I get a graduate degree in technical writing?” I’ve had quite a few interesting […]
Archives for August 2007
Simplest of style guides
Ah, simplicity. Elegant. Succinct. Basic. Good. Welcome to ASI, new writer. Here are the basics: Write well, quickly, in the active voice and the present tense. Put punctuation outside the quoted material. Maintain gender neutrality. (“He” and “she”: bad. “They”: good.) Replace semicolons with periods. Use numerals for all numbers. Make cross-references target-neutral. Insert AIT […]
DITA and wiki – w/ho/w will (we/you) write
I received an excellent question from a reader about his eagerness to use wikis for his product’s doc set, but he came across conflicts and issues when he questioned the practicality of maintaining a wiki for his large set of documentation. Here’s Paul’s well-phrased request for information. I am considering using a wiki for documentation […]