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July 15, 2008 by annegentle

The art – and instinct – of productivity

I just completed David Allen’s excellent book, Getting Things Done:The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I found that some of his tips I do instinctively, yet perhaps not yet naturally, but this book helped me apply practical principles to time management. Plus, he shows us that it’s not always easy to get to “what is the […]

August 30, 2007 by annegentle

Levels of difficulty and stress in a technical writer job

I have been thinking lately about how to measure the level of stress and difficulty you could expect from a particular technical writing job. Would it be the type of content you write? The output requirements? The deadlines? This post is a result of some ideas my coworkers and I discussed over lunch the other […]

August 16, 2007 by annegentle

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 […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about developer support at Cisco recently, especially for the way the world works today with multiple cloud providers. This post is a re-publish of my talk from over five years ago, but the techniques and tools for listening and helping others are still true today. At Rackspace, we watched several […]

Cisco DevNet is our developer program for outreach, education, and tools for developers at Cisco. From the beginning, the team has had a vision for how to run a developer program. Customers are first, and the team implements what Cisco customers need for automation, configuration, and deployment of our various offerings. Plus, the DevNet team […]

I had a great talk with Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf Technical Writing consulting last week. Here are the show notes, full of links to all the topics we covered. Podcasts are great fun to listen to and participate in, if a bit nerve-wracking to think on your feet and make sure you answer questions succinctly […]

At the beginning of this year, I worked hard to summarize my thoughts on API documentation, continuous publishing, and technical accuracy for developer documentation. The result is an article on InfoQ.com, edited by Deepak Nadig, who also was forward-thinking in having me speak to a few teams at Intuit about API documentation coupled with code. Always […]