Remember, when you studied in college you had to deal with writing different papers? And, if they were not hand written there were all those requirements about the font size, the quotes, the page breaks…’Yuck! But my paper is very much readable the way it is. Do I really have to do this? What a…
Continue reading »Hyphenation is a linguistic phenomenon which is quite often left out of grammar books. Nevertheless, there are rules that one must follow to use hyphens right. Technical writers, for example, need to make their user documentation look professional. Otherwise, their readers might think that the company itself is untrustworthy. Let’s try to figure out how…
Continue reading »If you’ve ever read documentation written by a programmer, it will become clear pretty fast that creating user guides requires a whole different set of skills. Sure, programmers might have the necessary knowledge base, but most of them aren’t very apt in communicating the information in a user-friendly manner. Thus, the user guides they create…
Continue reading »Your documentation team is one busy department. Useful documentation heavily relies on your team’s ability to keep the workflow moving, but in a business where things are notoriously fast-paced, that can be a difficult thing to achieve. With that said, you might find another article interesting, that is – Documentation Team: How to Delegate Tasks….
Continue reading »The numbers paint an accurate picture: visual content rules the digital world. Articles that feature relevant images get about 94% more views than content without graphics. Moreover, the human brain is wired to respond better to visual stimuli than text. In fact, we process images 60,000 times faster than the written word. That’s undoubtedly huge….
Continue reading »You may have seen this job title popping on professional platforms or in your network, only to ask yourself: what exactly does a technical writer do? The intuitive definition of technical writing is that it is a profession that focuses on documenting the knowledge base of products and services and making them easy to understand…
Continue reading »It is hard to imagine now that people will be ever going back to living thier lives without the Internet. Being offline will soon disappear as a concept. The IOT is about to burst, and this will finally settle ‘being online’ as equal to ‘being alive’. Our newspapers, TV shows, family pictures, work…Everything is just…
Continue reading »Becoming part of a documentation team can be a challenge for a writer who is not experienced in this type of work, as it requires a new set of skills and a very specific writing style and approach. Even if you recruit a writer with prior experience in creating documentation and user guides, you still…
Continue reading »Technical documentation is not just any text. It is a whole new world with its rules and patterns to follow. This article will explain how technical writers can avoid the most common mistakes when writing a user manual. Abbreviations Abbreviations are great. They save us time and effort. We can transmit information faster using abbreviations,…
Continue reading »What do we want from any user manual? Clarity and consistency. And, good looks. How can we achieve this? Well, as far as looks are concerned, you can start off by reading this article on user documentation design. And, there’s a long list of things that can be done to improve a user manual’s consistency…
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