Over the decades, I’ve practiced or been exposed to a number of martial arts. My technique was never very good, but I got to meet a lot of … interesting individuals.

While I’ve never had to use what I learned on the job (there have been times when I was tempted, though), some of the principles of learning martial arts can definitely be applied to technical communication. How? Well, read on.

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As Keith Soltys mentioned in a comment on a recent post in this space, librarians are the people that companies shoud turn to wen creating a taxonomy for … well, for just about any content. But librarians also have some interesting insights into search. Not just about what to look for and where, but how to search. And, just as important, the connections betwen items and (of course) the taxonomies that apply to those connections.

I really believe that technical communicators and content strategists can learn a lot from librarians, and the techies who work along side them. That belief was reinforced when I read these posts at the Toronto Public Library’s Web team blog.

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• A little humour: the 13 greatest error messages of all time
• Tim O’Reilly discusses Twitter as publishing
• Some notes on user experience and design from the UXLondon conference
• Should your documentation go deeper or wider?
• Solid advice on writing clearly and simply
• Freelance translators clash with LinkedIn over crowdsourced translations. Could this happen with crowdsourced docs, too?

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by: Sarah Maddox

We’ve all seen those lists of characteristics that make a good technical writer, as posted in job ads or course descriptions. They’re more like a wish list than anything based on fact. I’d be a pretty weird person if such a list described the whole me. “The ability to turn geek-speak into baby talk; the ability to spot a mizplaced (sic) zed from ten yards out; unflappability when informed that the deadline that everyone else knew about has just passed; unquestioning acceptance of the ineffability of product management; flexibility to the point of contortionism; fluency in 42 languages, none of them human; preference given to Klingon …”

Come to think of it, technical writers are pretty weird individuals. And proud of it. You’d have to be, um, unusual, to actually enjoy writing. On 8 June this year, a United States district court judge sentenced a white-collar criminal to write a book. That’s right, the crim’s penalty is to spend a significant period of time writing.

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This one by Sarah Maddox, who you may know from her blog or from her work at Atlassian.

What has Sarah written for this space? Check back tomorrow to find out. Her post is definitely worth a read.

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A picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, then a video should be worth several pages of those words. Video is the ultimate in showing and telling. Instead of relying on lengthy procedures,
a short, well-made video can walk a user through what needs to be done to complete a task.

But is video the be all, end all? Is it really the next stage in the evolution of documentation? Will it supplant text and static images? Read on to learn what I think.

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