Writing Serendipity

I was at the State Library of Queensland this afternoon, studying for my Postgraduate Certificate in Editing and Electronic Publishing. I grabbed the library's copy of Creator to Consumer, a required reading by Bill Cope and Dean Mason, and made my way over to a corner with a great view.

Inside my book, I found a quirky business card, advertising the services of

Become a coder-poet in just 8 weekends?

This blog post might be of interest to technical writers who work in the IT industry. The premise is that you can go from a complete neophyte to a sort-of-competent programmer in 8 weekends.

I think I will probably give it a bash in about 6 months, but would love to hear about anyone who follows his program!

Get your Index on!

This morning, I found out that you can be something called a "freelance indexer". That is one more field that had never crossed my mind, as I figured that indexing was probably done by robots.

In fact, I once saw a demonstration of a prototype robo-indexer, that would automatically semantically link keywords in documentation to their definitions. The prototype has yet to result in a more robust tool, so I guess that humans will play a large part in creating indexes for a while still.

If you want to learn more about indexing, maybe you should look into this course. Goes down in Sydney on the 28th of June.

Web-based Writing Critic Robot

It was only a matter of time before "going to the internet for an opinion" on your writing literally meant "going to the Internet for an opinion".

Slick Write is an internet tool (Robot) that claims to be able to give you stylistic advice on your writing. This goes beyond grammar, beyond even the Gunning Fog check.

Here is how their feedback breaks down, straight from the horses mouth:

• Critique - This tab contains the body of text with stylistic features highlighted.
• Structure - Here you will find the sentences color coded by type and length.
• Flow - Hold your readers' interest by maintaining good flow.
• Stats - This is where you will find important statistics on a variety of subjects including readability, word frequencies, and repeated phrases.

I'll be trying this with some of my own writing, both professional and personal. Please, let us know about your experience with this tool, and of any others like it. 

Whats the point? Article 4: Provide services like meetings, publications, seminars and conferences.

This series has taken longer than I thought it would, which I guess must be a life lesson. That being said, let's get started!

The STC Australia Chapter's charter has as article 4:
"to provide services for Australian technical communicators in the form of meetings, publications, seminars and conferences"

Australian technical writers are widely dispersed, and our approach to providing these services has to recognize how far we live from one another. Hence, our monthly meetings are held online.

This Thursday's meeting promises to be a real hair-raiser! Over the course of up to two hours, we'll be discussing...

What do you know about typography?

I thought it would be worthwhile to share this video, because without typography there would be no technical writing. Feel free to watch it at the office, and call it work!

A Documentation Cautionary Tale.

Heroku, a platform as a service (PAAS) cloud service provider, was caught with documentation that described software that subscribers weren't getting.

In this documentation bait-and-switch, Heroku's documented a technology that they'd removed from their product because it didn't scale with their increasing customer base.

Eventually, they had to admit that their documentation was about 2 years out of date, which they chalked up to "focus on new products". They burned their own clients, and their potential future clients, by showing themselves to be untrustworthy.

There is a warning there: documentation is a type of advertising. It had better describe what customers are paying for!