#29421
Sure, the economy's booming now, but as the Asian crisis becomes the North American crisis, it pays to remember Newton's famous law of gravity: what goes up must come down again. And, of course, when the economy comes down and pension fund managers start asking those awkward questions about why they should remain invested in your company's stock, managers have a lemming-like tendency to trim staff to make room for short-term profits and long-term plausible deniability. As a technical communicator, you're obviously well up on the hit list, which some might see as a bad thing--but there's a silver lining to every cloud (or, in our case, a copper lining; they don't pay us well enough for silver). In fact, the good news is that it's easy to ensure you're the first one fired, so you can leave before the job becomes mundane without looking like a quitter. Then there are all those perquisites (severance pay, a little downtime)...
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (1999). Careers>Unemployment>Planning>Technical Writing
#29437
Dr. Strangemeeting (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Donuts)
Experts claim you'll spend 1500 hours in meetings during a typical 30-year career--that is, if you can duck some meetings by looking busy and if you can retire early. If you duck slowly or plan a long career, you could easily spend more time in meetings than you spend working. Fortunately, a little planning and some quick thinking should let you turn meetings into a blessing--or at least a tolerable evil.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (2001). Careers>Workplace>Collaboration
#29416
Conveying the emotional tone of a Web page has, up until now, been impossible with HTML, and the XML standard fails to address this issue. As an interim solution, developers have proposed several new tags to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (1998). Humor>Computing>XML>Emotions
#19682
Times are hard, and many former writers are pounding the dirt looking for work. Some who have extensive experience with peer review or revising documents are expanding their job searches to include careers as editors. However, new editors often face a barrier to entering the profession: the editing test. Rather than taking a chance on unproven candidates, publishers and other clients typically ask would-be editors to review short documents that test three main aspects of an editor’s skills.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2003). Articles>Editing>Writing
#19708
Investigates some of the specific issues involved in editing Web sites, an increasingly common task for us wage slaves and an enormous opportunity for freelancers.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2003). Design>Web Design>Editing
#24202
Editing Web Pages: A Second Look 
How to edit Web pages--with revision tracking--using Microsoft Word.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2004). Articles>Editing>Web Design>Writing
#15126
Offers editors tips on creating and using style sheets.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2002). Design>Information Design>Style Sheets
#29425
The Editor as Translator (or: How Do You Say That in Calculus?)
Sometimes English just isn't the most elegant way to say something. It might be so much easier if we write for a math journal, because the correct language for the explanation can be, in fact, mathematics.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (1999). Articles>Editing>Scientific Communication>Mathematics
#14612
Effective Interviewing: Get the Story
In this article, Geoffrey Hart offers the following tips on how to interview a subject matter expert (SME) for reliable, comprehensive, timely information:
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2000). Articles>Interviewing>Collaboration
#28084
Effective Outlining: Designing Workable Blueprints for Writing
Save time and increase your credibility by creating an effective outline. Hart's article discusses three important steps in designing an outline.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2006). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing
#29410
Estimating Project Times and Costs Without Losing Your Shirt--Or Your Sanity
Determining how long it takes to complete a job is essential for planning and for budgeting your time, whether you're a wage slave or a freelancer. In this article, I'll focus on the needs of the freelancer, but the same approach will work equally well for managers of teams of technical communicators and even for lone writers.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (2006). Careers>Freelance>Proposals
#15132
File-Exchange and Workflow Issues
Suggests ways that editors can organize multiple versions of articles and avoid the pitfalls of transferring electronic files over the Internet.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2000). Articles>Editing>Online
#28369
It's not easy to find rewarding work. Hart describes three steps you can take to help the process go more smoothly when searching for that new job.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2006). Careers>TC
#14256
For decades, journalists have used a proven approach called the 'Five W's' to answer the questions that the readers of newspaper articles most commonly want writers to answer. The questions are sufficiently useful that they can easily be applied outside newspaper writing, and I've already written about this in the context of audience analysis (Hart 1996). In this article, I'll show you how you can use these questions to develop more useful online help. Each of the five W's is a simple question that starts with the letter W: Why, Who, What, Where, and When. Some authorities add a sixth question, 'How,' to this list, but 'how to' information generally fits under what, where, or when, depending on the nature of the information. Users of online help can benefit greatly from the proven journalistic approach if we can answer these same five questions for each help topic that we create. In the remainder of this article, I'll provide an example of a failure to ask these questions, show how asking these five questions could have prevented this failure, and provide examples of typical questions we should be asking. Please note that, although I've presented these five questions in an order that seems logical to me, in practice the approach becomes iterative: It doesn't much matter where you begin, since answering one question often reveals important aspects of the other questions that you'd not yet considered.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. TECHWR-L (2002). Articles>Documentation>Help
#10277
The Five W's: An Old Tool for the New Task of Task Analysis 
An audience pays attention to your attempts at communication because they have certain needs that they expect you to solve. As journalists have long known, it's possible to meet the majority of an audience's need for information by answering five 'W' questions: what, who, where, when, and why. Although this approach is a core element of journalism, it has obvious applications to technical communicators, who must create information in the context of meeting an audience's needs.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Technical Communication Online (1996). Articles>Writing
#29423
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Using Affordances
The trick is to make data-entry forms clear enough that workers understand what you require of them without having to ask. This understanding alone can drastically reduce the frequency of errors, but to turn that understanding into a payback, you'll have to design a label for each field that is truly obvious to the workers. Information designers call these clues "affordances", and if you're lucky enough to have technical writers or editors in your organization, you can probably enlist their aid in designing these clues.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (1999). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Usability>Forms
#22576
Getting Involved in Interface Design
Describes a four-step process to help technical writers gain influence over product design.
#15139
Presents ten humorous suggestions for technical writers on how to persuade reviewers of documentation to do their jobs.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2000). Articles>Editing>Collaboration
#29424
The first 'macro viruses' attached to Microsoft Word documents emerged within weeks after Office 97 was released, and sounded the warning that a new era was upon us.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (1999). Articles>Computing>Security>Viruses
#13714
Hart’s Law: The Magical Number Three, Plus or Minus Zero
George Miller, infamous for his 'magical number seven, plus or minus two,' somehow missed an even more important principle of how the world works: no matter how clever we think we are, it still takes us three tries to get anything approximately right. Although most of us have proven beyond a shadow of doubt our ability to blunder around and take many more than three tries, the overwhelming majority of us get it nearly right on the third try.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Usability Interface (2002). Articles>Usability
#30123
Hierarchies in Online Information: Balancing Depth and Breadth
Hart explains how understanding hierarchies--the order in which information is grouped--can help you choose an appropriate balance between the depth and breadth of your online information.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2007). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Online
#29438
Hockey and the Art of Technical Communication
If STC would fund an appropriately intensive study of the NHL, I have no doubt we could inspire dramatic changes in technical communication; the contrasts between the NFL and NHL approaches have profound consequences for our work.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (2001). Articles>TC
#14722
Identifying Additions and Deletions, Part I: Using Compatible Software
Hart describes the problems and possibilities of Microsoft Word's Track Changes feature.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2001). Articles>Editing>Software>Microsoft Word
#14736
Identifying Additions and Deletions, Part II: Incompatible Software
Hart describes the difficulties of viewing electronic edits when the editor and the author are using incompatible software, and offers tips for working around these difficulties.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2002). Articles>Editing>Software>Video
#29433
If you create a community around your Web site, look beyond providing the outer semblances of community: design a site that can potentially work the way each of these very different members of the community wants it to work.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (2000). Articles>Web Design>Community Building
