Blogs

Big Brother is Watching

Back in the olden days (OK, 5 years ago), vetting a potential employee meant making a phone call or two to references carefully screened and prepped by the job candidate himself. Unless you hired a private detective, secrets remained secrets and private lives remained private. Not so in this day and age. A simple search on any number of social media sites can tell you who your candidate associates with and what causes or groups he’s aligned with. You may even find you have mutual friends you didn’t know about.

Listen Up...You've Got Customers!

While not surprising to me, my last blog post was read by an amazing number of people. Five times more, in fact, than the previous post! How did they all know about it? Partly because the blog is linked to my Linked-in and Twitter profiles which notified my followers that it was updated; and partly because I used a lot of creative methods to draw people into our new site. (Hey, if you are reading, then I must know what I am talking about.) Unless you have been on an extended African safari for the last 12 months, you probably noticed that social media has caught on with breathtaking speed.

Before Internet, Laptops, Cell Phones and GPS, Menachem Was...

...sitting down to his first job as a technical writer back in 1992. His tools were a pad of paper and the most basic version of word processing that we can imagine today. Indexing was still done first on actual index cards and large files were saved on multiple floppy disks. Layout was a slow and meticulous process, and closing a file was a long, drawn out affair. PDFs were still light years away in the future.

What Goes Around Comes Around

A true story:  my friend – let's call her Susan – is three days into a week-long vacation at the beach when she receives an urgent call from her boss insisting she return immediately. Alarmed and surprised by the news that her job is on the line, Susan quickly packs up, says goodbye to the beach-house and somehow manages to avoid a speeding ticket as she races back to the office. She rolls up her proverbial sleeves, ready to receive the assignment so important that it couldn’t wait or be assigned to a coworker.

Why Don't Technical Writers (or Customers) Read?

Why don’t technical writers (or customers) read?

Come on, you’ve seen it yourself. Give a technical writer a new product or a gadget, they open the box, toss the manual and then try on their own to figure out how it works. So why spend money to write the manual in the first place? And how can it be that technical writers have so little respect for their own line of work?

How does good technical documentation directly translate into more sales?

This won’t be a bible length post, since the answer to my question is actually pretty simple. I highly doubt any of you has managed without buying something made in China during the past 12 months. If you have succumbed, you probably noticed some funny explanations, instructions or statements on the side of the package (unless the marketing and documentation material was produced in a native English speaking country).

Is creating good technical documentation worth the money?

In the past few weeks, many claims have been made about our new world economy. Perhaps the most thought provoking is an article I just read about how many of us are about to become useless in the next few years. Simply put, “the economy no longer needs us”. Is this the future of technical writing? Are we and our “product” obsolete and no longer needed?