Clear as Mud: The Plot Thickens

A lot of the time, management-speak simply seems ridiculous. But campaigners for plain English say there is a more serious side to the issue.

BBC (1998). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric>Minimalism

Clear Writing: Ten Principles of Clear Statement

If you want to test the clearness of your writing, you may wish to consider using a 'fog index.' Fog indexes measure the complexity of writing samples, and often provide a means of calculating the reading or educational level required to understand a particular passage. Some fog indexes are available as computer software programs, or you may do the calculations yourself.

University of Missouri (1973). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric>Minimalism

"Coffee Stains": How to Remove the Blots Quickly and Easily  

Trainers and others in the professional development field have a dual mission (among other responsibilities): to identify written 'coffee stains' and, equally important, to find and use as many effective approaches as possible to get the word out to the largest number of users.

Houser, Barbara J. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Education>Writing

Collaborative Document Editing with svk

Say you have a document that needs to be presented in two languages and you are the translator. While the translation is in progress, someone revises the original master document. This means you now might be working with an outdated paragraph or one no longer present in the master version. This article tries to map this problem to parallel development, which version control systems solve with the branch and merge model. You will also see how svk helps you maintain translated documents easily.

Kao, Chia-liang. O'Reilly and Associates (2004). Articles>Content Management>Collaboration>Writing

College Composition and Communication  

CCC is a peer-reviewed journal about issues in rhetoric and writing from an academic perspective.

CCC. Journals>Writing

College Writing Assessment: Online Community and Resources

College Writing Assessment is a website containing research and information on the evolving field of teaching of technical communication at the college level. It will include the results of our yearly assessments at New Jersey Institute of Technology, changing technical communication criteria, and our collaborations with other institutions.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (2005). Resources>Education>Assessment>Technical Writing

A Collegiate Writing Program for the 1980s

The two growth areas right now are the English as a second language (ESL) courses and the business and technical writing courses. The ESL courses fall outside the province of this paper, but the business and technical writing courses are very pertinent.

Corbett, Edward P.J. ADE Bulletin (1989). Articles>Education>Writing

Combine Writing, Editing and Design in Your Employee Publication

After more than a decade of working in the corporate environment, I have finally accepted that readers need to be enticed by more than the promise of a good read: They need proof. They want a visual two-second test-drive before they decide whether or not to spend precious minutes on a particular page. This is not to say that corporate readers are not discerning or that sloppy copy reads any better when dressed up with elaborate design. The truth is that in any corporate publication, a great article won't be read if the layout is poor. Similarly, a stunning design falls flat if the content doesn't live up to it.

Dower, Sophia. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Writing>Editing>Newsletters

Coming into the Workplace: What Every Technical Communicator Should Know—Besides Writing  

Working successfully as a technical communicator involves a great deal more than a thorough knowledge of professional skills and capability in the craft. Working at this kind of job means dealing with all sorts of people, handling all sorts of assignments and dealing with all sorts of corporate agendas and requirements that have seemingly little to do with getting the project out the door. But it’s all in a day’s work, and if you want to keep the job, you’ve got to accept and actually operate within all of those guidelines, strictures, rules (written and unwritten) and mores that make up the corporate structure.

Barker, Thomas, Rebecca A. Fuller, Deborah J. Rosenquist, John Schladen and Thea Teich. STC Proceedings (1995). Careers>Workplace>Writing>Technical Writing

Coming to Grips with Theory: College Students' Use of Theoretical Explanation in Writing About History    

This is an exploratory study of reading and writing within a particular discipline. It is also an investigation of critical thinking and an examination of engagement and resistance in using language to learn about new concepts. I looked at how college history students wrestled with and sometimes worked around issues of theory, specifically theories of the causes of the Civil War. Using analysis of think-aloud protocols, I investigated how students comprehended theoretical writing about the Civil War and how they used the theoretical material to take a position in writing about these same issues. My main purpose in this article is to examine the cognitive moves students make, their ways of thinking, when working with theory, an activity which many educators today are touting as particularly important in developing students’ critical thinking abilities. I am especially interested in the stances students take toward their subject matter which promote critical reasoning, that is, which lead to engagement, as well as approaches which circumvent or stand in the way of such thinking, that is, which lead to resistance.

Durst, Russel K. LLAD (1994). Articles>Writing>History

Comment Organiser son Contenu

La manière dont vous allez organiser votre contenu est fortement dépendante du produit que vous allez éditer : page d'accueil, chronique, interview, brève, dossier, lettre d'information,...

Hardy, Jean-Marc. Redaction (2004). (French) Articles>Web Design>Writing

Common Mistakes: Functional Specification for Web Development

What are pitfalls that companies should avoid when specifying Web applications for internal or external development?

Buerki, Nicolas. E-Consultancy (2004). Articles>Writing>Specifications>Functional Specifications

Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs

Weblogs (blogs) have been heralded as a new space for collaborative creativity, a medium for breaking free of the constraints of previous forms and allowing authors greater access to flexible publishing methods. This generalization seems extreme: genre studies done by Crowston and Williams (2000) and Shepherd and Watters (1998) lend credence to the notion that weblogs are evolutionary descendents of other visual media, such as newspapers and pamphlets. In this study, we apply content-analytic methods (Bauer, 2000) to a random sample of weblogs as a means of exploring current visual trends within the blogosphere.

Scheidt, Lois Ann and Elijah Wright. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Communicating Bad

Companies place little emphasis on the quality of an engineer's writing. An engineer's writing is usually only for evidence a particular transaction took place, or for proof they did the appropriate research. There is hardly ever any emphasis on the readability or usefulness of the writing. In this article, the author states several reasons for this problem and that development teams must come to understand in order to find a solution.

Brogan, Nate. StickyMinds (2006). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>Engineering

Communicating Clearly: It Often Pays to Repeat Information

A common observation of clients who're reading first drafts of the work they've ordered is that, 'You said that once already, so we can take this sentence out.' In fact, a certain amount of redundancy helps to get the point across.

Bennaco (2005). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric

Communicating in Spite of TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms)  

The unchecked use of acronyms and initialisms in technical writing presents a huge obstacle to clarity and readability. Although technical communicators are certainly more aware of this problem than are the engineers, scientists, and managers with whom they work, they need concrete guidelines and at least a small degree of self-righteousness on this subject to help them cope with the onslaught. That acronyms frustrate communication is well-founded in linguistic theory and common sense. Suggestions for mitigating their effect include issues of audience, term selectivity, frequency and occasion of use, and aesthetics.

Miller, Diane F. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Writing>Style Guides

Communicating the Impossible: Is Technology Creating Information Overload?

It is sometimes puzzling why so much of the information to which present-day people are being exposed is so weak. One possible explanation is that because technology makes it so easy to create and distribute large quantities of information in a very short period of time, the creators of the information become more concerned with quantity rather than quality. Is this simply an oversight, a result of too many technocrats who believe that because they created the tools, they are also the best qualified to use them? Or is this phenomenon a deliberate mechanism that has been devised to justify the need for continued technological progress (i.e., more sophisticated communication tools)? One fact is becoming clear: the people driving technology into the future often do not devote enough attention to the quality of information.

Vasdi, Peter and Peter Zvalo. Writer's Block (1996). Articles>Writing>Communication

Communication in Technology Transfer and Diffusion: Defining the Field    

Provides an introduction to our field’s connections with technology transfer and diffusion. Technology transfer, the complex social process that moves technology from bench to market, drives global economic growth; technology diffusion, the market-driven process by which innovations are adopted and implemented, follows similar patterns. Indeed, technology transfer and diffusion may be considered synonymous with the phenomenon of growth in a global economy.

Coppola, Nancy W. Technical Communication Quarterly (2006). Articles>Communication>Technology>Technical Writing

Company Name First in Microcontent? Sometimes!

Typically, you should deemphasize your company's name in links, but a new guideline recommends frontloading the name for search engine links under certain conditions.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Hypertext

Comparative Assessment of Document Usability With Writing Quality Measures  

Measures of writing quality were developed on the basis of research findings on reading, writing, and cognition. From among the over twenty measures developed by the quality project, this paper illustrates theoretical and methodological issues for two kinds of measures: agents of action in sentences and task-oriented headings. When applied to a sample set of documents, these measures showed the writing to be inconsistent in style among the documents and only partly in conformance with suggestions derived from research. Though technical communication writing guidelines may be well thought out and grounded in years of practice, to have credibility in the new quality environment, writing guidelines need to be supported by testing. This paper discusses the development and testing of document quality measures that can be used as the basis of writing guidelines. The measures were tested both by using them to score technical documents, which will be discussed here, and laboratory testing with document users, which will not be discussed in this paper.

Krull, Robert. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Writing>Assessment

Competentieprofiel Technische Communicatie

STIC-leden kunnen zich uitstekend vinden in het competentieprofiel voor de Technisch Communicatie-specialist. Dat blijkt uit de resultaten van de enquête die de werkgroep Opleiding en Trainingen in het najaar 2007 aan de STIC-leden voorlegde.

STIC (2008). (Dutch) Careers>TC>Writing>Technical Writing

The Complete Beginner's Guide to Writing Articles

So how do you get started? What do you write about? What do you actually DO with your articles once you've written them? It seems daunting, I know. I was petrified myself when I first started writing articles, I still get nervous every time I start submitting a new article all over the net.

Stewart, Anna-Marie. DevBay (2005). Articles>Writing>Publishing>Online

Composing Across Multiple Media    

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from each as they did so. Using sociosemiotic and dialogic-intertextual theoretical frameworks, the author examines how the interface of the video editing program influenced the students' composing by making new types of semiotic resources available and new means of combining these resources. As they moved across these media in a nonlinear fashion, the students created an interactive context for composing that transcended the individual possibilities of each respective medium. This suggests that multimedial composing environments offer a rich intertextual landscape and unique ways of making meanings.

Ranker, Jason. Written Communication (2008). Articles>Education>Writing>Multimedia