Tech Writer This Week brings you commentary on big subjects (not those second level headings or bullet points, but the BIG subjects) this week: fear, creativity, confidence, awkwardness, simplicity, and the screw up. All tied together in a nice neat package of stuff from around the web. We start off with Technical Communication and fear. Technical Communicators are afraid. Rick Lippincott dragged our fear into the light and rattled its cage during his STC 2012 Summit Lightening Talk. This is great stuff, and worth a look now (even ten months later). Click the link to hear what he has to say, and then let us know if  you agree. Bill Kershbaum (intextwriting.com) tells us what to do if your users hate (yes, *hate*) the user guide you wrote. And Ugur Akinci has information on two technical writers who successfully migrated into creative writing. You can do it, too, if you want to.

Wandering over into Content Strategy, we find the Guerrilla Editor (guerrilla-editor.blogspot.com) telling us there is no such thing as a finished website. And Mark Tilly (hbusiness2community.com) says content curation builds writing confidence.

In User Experience, Andrew Zusman (uxbooth.com) talks about how awkward ordinary keyboards are for those who have only one hand — or one arm. Cheryl Platz (huffingtonpost.com), describes how even small changes can make big differences for your users.  Jay Selway (uxmag.com) discusses why simplicity can be a rather tricky goal to achieve. And Frank Guo (uxmatters.com) delivers the long awaited part 3 of his series on the Four Elements of User Experience.

This week, the Career and Life grab bag offers a ton of troubleshooting help straight from Microsoft, courtesy of TechSupportAlert (techsupportalert.com). Ilya Pozin (techritesolutions.wordpress.com) clues us in on how to recover after screwing up in the office. I’m bookmarking this one, because you never know. And Susan Harkins (techrepublic.com) discusses 10 features of Office you really should know about.