 | | Carolina Communique 71 found. Page 1 of 3. |
#28170
To save yourself heartache, introduce the accounting department to the idea of measuring the total value returned minus the cost of documentation. After all, if the accounting department understands one thing, it's saving (or attempting to) save money. If you can show them that, yes, you did do fewer pages, but it saved three days of your time and managerial review, four thousand dollars in printing, and many hours of customer service dealing with disgruntled users, the department may be more understanding.
Brautman, Heather. Carolina Communique (2004). Careers>TC
#28187
Acrobat Features Turbocharge the Online Review Process
One of the more tedious and error-prone processes in technical writing is that of collaborative document review. Even when documents are shared electronically, keeping track of comments, suggestions, and changes contributed by multiple team members can be exasperating. Too often errors due to collaborative review lead to delays, missed deadlines, misunderstandings and an inaccurate final document.
Gravel, Charlie. Carolina Communique (2003). Articles>Document Design>Software>Adobe Acrobat
#29795
An Almost Final Farewell to Desktop Word Processing
The era of desktop publishing is over, and I must bid Microsoft Word and several other desktop applications good-bye. In case you think I'm singling out Microsoft, it's not just MS Word, but also OpenOffice, GoogleOffice, or any application that makes what we used to call 'documents'. Nowadays, I'm simply using a wiki for collaborative information sharing and a blog for online reporting.
Albing, Bill. Carolina Communique (2007). Articles>Word Processing>Online>Wikis
#29273
Writers of English have choices. Most every word we commit to paper (or its electronic equivalent) has a synonym
Wenger, Andrea. Carolina Communique (2007). Articles>Writing>Grammar>Tropes
#28153
Automating Production with WebWorks AutoMap
WebWorks AutoMap is an extremely useful tool for performing unattended documentation builds. Out of the box, AutoMap can generate reasonable documents. By adding the power of scripting, the results can be amazing.
Bate, Simon. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Documentation>Software>Word Processing
#28171
Behind the Scenes of Creating Value
There's a lot of volunteer work that that goes on behind the scenes by chapter members to create value. Today, I'm inviting you to get involved so you can take part in and benefit from creating value.
Koster-Lenhardt, Victoria 'Vici'. Carolina Communique (2004). Articles>TC>Community Building>STC
#28163
To get the most out of your STC membership--take action. Join a committee, write an article for the newsletter, go to a workshop, volunteer for the chapter conference.
Feldman, Diane. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>TC>Community Building>STC
#13022
This site is an extension of the Carolina Communiqué, the monthly newsletter of the Carolina Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. In these Web pages, you can read back issues of the newsletter and browse through some of the more timeless feature articles. You can also find out what you can do to contribute. This newsletter's for you, about you, and from you....
#28154
In the same way that the word 'truthiness' is not a real word but is gaining usage in our culture, so the word 'connectfulness' offers us in the professional arena a way to express an important aspect of our work. Just as truthiness says more than accuracy and is friendlier than truthfulness, so connectfulness says more than networked and is friendlier and more inclusive than connectedness.
Albing, Bill. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Content Management>Collaboration
#28155
Copyright is extremely important in our economy today. Intellectual property fuels our economy to a great extent: 1/3 of the market of US stock, and 42% of gross domestic product. A copyright protects authorship, either now known or later developed. There are fundamental concepts of copyright: it needs to be in a tangible form and it needs to be eligible.
Kinder, Meredith. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Intellectual Property>Copyright
#28156
Dangling modifiers can be humorous for the reader, but humiliating for the writer. They're insidious, creeping into our prose and undermining our sentence structure. But they're easy to find if you know what to look for.
Wenger, Andrea. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Writing>Grammar
#13034
I presented a program recently that gave tips for becoming a more effective delegator. The tips explained the benefits of delegation and how to overcome common barriers. Because you can use these tips whenever you are leading a chapter, a committee, a team, or a department, I want to share them with you. If you are not delegating properly, you are making your own life more difficult. In turn, your subordinates suffer because their interests as well as their talents are being overlooked, however unintentionally.
Laurent, J. Suzanna. Carolina Communique (1999). Careers>Management
#29798
Part of professional development involves recognizing your strengths and learning how to express it to others. It is a helpful exercise to develop a tagline for yourself, in the same way that professionals in a previous generation were encouraged to develop a mission statement. With shortening attention spans, today's professional needs only a few-word tagline to fit in the sound bite of management's smaller time slots. Beyond what Chris Benz would call shameless self-promotion, having a personal tagline keeps your career development focused and on track.
Albing, Bill. Carolina Communique (2007). Careers>Business Communication>Workflow
#28188
Developing Technical Curiosity: A Marketable Skill
Every technical writer should have strong writing skills. Just as important, in my judgment, is a keen sense of technical curiosity. As a hiring manager, I look for it in every job applicant I interview. If you do not have this sense naturally, you can develop it.
Harvey, Michael. Carolina Communique (2003). Careers>TC>Collaboration
#28178
As technical writers, we work more online than ever before. We are beginning to work with documentation in a new way, so that we can repurpose content and free it from the restrictions imposed by any particular delivery mechanism. We no longer solely create paper-publishable documents. We do not, as yet, have a good word for what we do; we do not have a single word or phrase that summarizes the effort or the deliverables. Nor can we use any single existing lexicon because the concepts are new. This difficulty is a natural consequence of the inter-networked world in which we work, where information is delivered multiple ways for diverse audiences. But let us look at the phrases currently growing in popular usage that refer to this effort.
Albing, Bill, Michelle Corbin Nichols and Ann-Marie Grissino. Carolina Communique (2004). Articles>Documentation>Online
#28172
To implement any continuous improvement process, you have to measure your progress. This is where metrics come in. Have you been struggling to create a process for measuring your technical documentation? If so, this article provides the information you need to get started.
Cohen, Jules. Carolina Communique (2004). Articles>Documentation>Assessment
#28173
It is commonplace to find information through the Web, but the use of the Web for technical communication is still uncommon. What the competition entries made me realize is that in this networked world, the places where we find information are no longer one or two dimensional. Communication is no longer simply about words on a page (or on a screen). Technical information is now accessed through a multidimensional cyberspace.
Albing, Bill. Carolina Communique (2004). Articles>Documentation>Online
#29790
When I peer-review a four-page document and insert the word the seventeen times, I wonder: Is this what my company is paying me to do? Am I truly adding value for my customers?
Wenger, Andrea. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Editing>Grammar
#28157
If you write documentation for products that can be dangerous if misused, ambiguity is scarier than rush hour traffic on I-40. If you already know what the sentence means, it's difficult to perceive that it could be taken to mean something else. By stringently applying rules of grammar, you help eliminate potential ambiguity even when you don't perceive it. Technical content is difficult enough to navigate; give the reader a clear path so he can focus on the journey instead of the road.
Wenger, Andrea. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Writing>Grammar
#29791
Globalization involves the process to adapt a company's product and message to meet the varied expectations of markets around the world.
Govindarajan, Sharmila M. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>TC>International
#30051
Technical communicators tend to be problem solvers. We ask ourselves, 'How can I make this better?' We don't want our instruction material to simply be serviceable; we want it to help make our readers' lives easier. One way we do that is by anticipating mistakes that users might make if they don't read carefully. We use various techniques to emphasize material that could otherwise be overlooked. Some effective means of drawing the reader's eye to important material are presented below. Note that this article doesn't address safety messages. For proper use of safety messages, consult your corporate guidelines and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Wenger, Andrea. Carolina Communique (2007). Articles>Writing>Grammar
#28174
Exporting Technical Writing Jobs
Traditionally, contractors have played an important role in the technical writing field by providing specific expertise, thereby allowing companies to focus on their core competencies. Contactors have made it possible for companies to add temporary personnel when needed ' an important benefit in a field where work output peaks periodically.
VanNorman, Maggie. Carolina Communique (2004). Careers>TC>Outsourcing>Offshoring
#28158
Finding "A Winning Community" at the STC 53rd Annual Conference
An STC conference is a unique type of education that supplements the formal theory and ideology one can learn in school. It is a place to interact with and learn from people with a range of professions, viewpoints, and expertise. It is a place to experience passion and vision for the field as a part of an international community. But most of all, it is a place filled with resources just waiting to be used by the next eager technical communicator.
Rothwell, Kimberly M. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>TC>Community Building
#28161
The hyphen serves a single function. It joins things together: syllables of a word separated at the end of a line; two words used as a compound; or a modifier and the word it describes (when the combination itself is used as a modifier). But for the latter two functions, a hyphen isn't always needed. So how do you decide?
Wenger, Andrea. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Writing>Grammar
#28176
Improving technical reviews, when subject matter experts, or SMEs, review content for technical accuracy, is a challenge every technical communicator faces sometime during their career. Every year, journal articles are published, presentations are made, and discussions are initiated on this very topic. Most of them conclude that SMEs are difficult. It's your job to bribe, cajole, or coerce a better review out of your SME. I don't agree.
Idoura, Alexia. Carolina Communique (2004). Articles>TC>Collaboration>SMEs
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