I'd Rather Be Writing Podcast

Corporations often expect tech comm academics to fashion their curriculums to suit corporate needs; in contrast, academic departments want to give students a safe space free of corporate agendas for critical inquiry. Tech comm academics are often caught between these two groups and must satisfy both.

This week I traveled to Louisiana to attend the Symposium for Communicating Complex Information and presented on tech comm trends. You can listen to the recording, view my slides, and read my latest thoughts on trends here.

How do you become a 10X technical writer in the workplace (10X means 10 times more efficient and productive than others)? In this post, I raise the question and then offer a few tips I try to follow: (1) Record your meetings with engineers, (2) Respond quickly to emails and messages, (3) Iterate on content with ever-expanding layers of reviewers, (4) Put some work back on those who request it, and...

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Every year, when I re-examine my site analytics, I take the time to reflect on trends I’m seeing with traffic to my own site. Not necessarily industry trends, just trends about which topics are popular on my site. Based on these trends, I assess and re-evaluate some of my directions. This year, I found that the increase in traffic on my API documentation site (which accounts for 59% of my overall...

The recording for the full-day API workshop that I recently gave in Menlo Park, California, is now available. This recording provides more than 5 hours of instruction about writing API docs -- for free. I also share some thoughts on cardioid versus omnidirectional microphones, and which is better in a workshop setting. The audio narration of this post switches around the microphones so you can hea...

In my Simplifying Complexity series, I added a new post called, Principle 11: Be both a generalist and specialist at the same time. I also recorded this essay as a narrated podcast.

If we just see our task as documenting solutions that engineers have solved, it removes the creativity and critical thinking dimension from tech comm. The creative dimension in tech comm comes into play as we identify and solve tech comm challenges, such as devising ways to simplify complexity or otherwise improve the user experience.

I'm giving a full-day API documentation workshop on Nov 8, 2018, in Menlo Park, California, in coordination with Scott Abel (aka, The Content Wrangler). There are still a few open spots left in the workshop.

In the debate between being a specialist or generalist, there's also a third option: developing technical acuity. A person with a high degree of technical acuity has the technical mindset needed to understand and solve problems across a variety of technical domains. Given the ever growing number of technologies, developing technical acuity can be more advantageous, especially in technical writ...

When we try to sell our tech comm skills, promoting our writing skills doesn't seem to impress people anymore, as writing is considered more of a presumed skill everyone has. To give a sense of value, we need to hyphenate our job titles, becoming more of a hybrid professional.

Seeing my name in the Census of Technical Communicators survey as a possible source for professional development made me think about the impact of blogs as a learning resource. Advertising encourages bloggers to create rapid-fire, lightweight content in order to increase page views and other attention on the advertised product or service. The proliferation of blog content turns the wheels of socia...

I added a new article in my ongoing series about simplifying complexity. The article is called Articulating the invisible stories that influence product adoption or rejection and explores why adoption of our products among users doesn't often live up to our expectations. I argue that we need to articulate the story we're telling about the product as well as the story users tell, and identi...

I added a new article in my ongoing series about simplifying complexity. The article is called Reducing the complexity of technical language and explores reasons why the language in technical documentation tends become so full of jargon and other unfamiliar terms, and a few solutions for simplifying the language. I emphasize the need to read the competitor's documentation and other articles in...

In this podcast, I chat with Professor Kirk St. Amant about the relationship between practitioners and academics. Kirk recently co-authored an article about research as a unifying focus to bring academics and practitioners together. Using this article as the basis for discussion, we dive into origins of the divide, why both practitioners and academics of the same field need each other, potential s...

This week I chatted with Bob Watson, an assistant professor of tech comm at Mercer University, about how to evaluate the user experience of documentation. The idea of doing a podcast came up during a comment thread on a previous post about reconstructing the absent user. We had a long exchange in the comment threads and thought it would be good to have a podcast about the topic.

I recently gave a half-day API workshop in Denver on March 10, 2018. Topics in the workshop included how to document reference API content (endpoints, parameters, requests, etc.), what non-reference topics (for example, status and error codes, rate limiting, getting started, sample apps) are common, how to create an OpenAPI specification document and Swagger UI output, and more. You can view a rec...

I recently gave a presentation to the STC San Francisco chapter called "Beyond mere endpoint reference — the overlooked content in API documentation" on February 21, 2018. You can browse the slides and listen to the audio recording here.

I recently gave a presentation to the STC San Diego chapter and WTD San Diego group called "Swagger UI and the OpenAPI specification" (February 13, 2018). You can view a recording of the presentation, browse the slides, and listen to the audio here.

I recently gave a presentation called "Publishing tools for API documentation" to the Write the Docs South Bay meetup group on January 18, 2018. You can view a recording of the presentation, browse the slides, and listen to the audio here.

Voracious reading begins with voracious thinking. Asking questions gives us a purpose and drive for reading.

When you don't have a system that logs users in and tracks their progress, it can be a challenge to show their progress in a course. However, rather than showing progress through completed pages, quizzes, or other interactive exercises, progress can also be measured through larger user goals that extend beyond the course. In the case of my API documentation course, the user's goal is to br...

I recently gave a presentation titled "Introduction to API Documentation" to the STC Silicon Valley chapter in Santa Clara, California. The video recording and audio are available here.

When documenting REST APIs, the OpenAPI specification (formerly called Swagger) is pretty much the default standard. Yet learning the OpenAPI spec is not a trivial undertaking and requires significant ramp-up. SwaggerHub is a tool can reduce the complexity in creating your OpenAPI spec file because it enables collaboration between both developers and technical writers. This collaboration not only...

Although technical writers champion plain language, embracing plain language for many years can cripple your ability to use more eloquent language, like that of a literary author or essayist. There isn't much room for literary play or playful tones in technical documentation. Following the rules of simple language has distorted my ability to read anything that blatantly violates those rules wi...