Building a Technical Writing Community

“Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much”                                                                                                           – Helen Keller It seems to me that the benefits of building a…

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Technical Writers: WHO are we? WHAT are we?

WHO are we, as technical writers? What are we? And, WHAT do we do. These are the questions that regularly come up when discussing technical writing and technical writers. Ironically, as our field becomes more widely known, our identity crisis has led to even more confusion than ever. We represent ourselves as Technical Writers and Technical Communicators. Others say we are Information Designers or Information Developers. Sometimes, we are called Content Developers or  Content Managers. The WHO we…

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Documentation Portals vs. KBs

Two "big" words in today's documentation are Documentation Portals and Knowledge Bases. For the first time in decades, it really does seem that we are seeing the end of PDF as a viable alternative for online applications (or any documentation that doesn't involve some element of hardware). With all these tools and formats, how do we decide what goes where? The simplistic answer is that we have to go, as always, according to the needs of our users.…

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Moscow and Documentation

While researching for a presentation, the concept of "Moscow" was discovered. Its brilliance and its relevancy is as relevant today as it was when created in 1994 by Dai Clegg, of Oracle. Moscow represents a means of defining features for a product, or in our case,  documentation priorities.  Those who are familiar with JIRA will be familiar with the High, Medium, and Low ratings. There are others as well. But somehow, once you learn about MoSCoW, it's easy…

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