Editor’s Note: For readers who want to enjoy Tech Writer This Week for May 30 via RSS without all the formatting issues, we’ve made it a bit easier by posting the introductory content here, and a link to the Storify curated content.
Hope all our US readers had a relaxing and reflective Memorial Day Holiday. As everyone gets back to work after the long weekend, Tech Writer This Week offers easy servings of tech comm views and commentary. I found Tom Johnson’s (idratherbewriting.com) post on Moving Beyond the TOC in Organizing Help Content to be intriguing because the authoring system I use at the office, MadCap Flare, revolves around the table of contents. Maybe I should learn to de-emphasize the TOC.
Elsewhere in Technical Communication, Bart Leahy (Heroic Technical Writing) shares an interesting post about he came to do engineering work with neither an engineering degree or (too much) mathematical aptitude. Scott Nesbitt (scottnesbitt.net) closes this section with a reminder that everyone needs to physically write things down on a pad of paper — and he tells us why.
As we move on to Content Strategy, Daniella Koren (mediapost.com) posts her opinion on whether to create or curate, and ponders the hazards of curation. If you decide to curate, Kim Stiglitz (verticalresponse.com) offers suggestions on how content curators (such as me) can avoid stealing content.
If you’re wondering exactly what the folks who work in Customer Experience Management do, check out Flavio Martins’ (business2community.com) description. It makes us think about whether people outside of tech comm wonder the same thing about us.
We finish this week in User Experience, where Kyle Henderson (speckyboy.com) shares a handful of the most common UX mistakes. And Abby Covert closes this section with an interesting slideshow where she uses cartoon-type drawings to emphasize her main argument that search is the way into UX. I don’t know how effective the comics are in this slideshow, but I do know that literacy levels in America are still declining. Food for thought.
Continue to Tech Writer This Week on Storify.
