Consideration Layer Model

As a technical writer, every decision you make is influenced by several discrete things, considerations for either the audience of the information, the process you’ll need to follow to collate and verify the information, and so on. Every decision requires such considerations but is it possible to model these?

One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>Theory

DITA Is Not the Answer

Single sourcing is good, I’m sure most of us can agree on that, but I’ve recently been wondering if perhaps DITA isn’t quite good enough?

McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2007). Articles>Content Management>XML>DITA

Everything is Connected

These are exciting times and we have a great opportunity to finally leverage technical communications into the spotlight. The value of information is finally being properly realised, and we are ideally placed to help any organisation make the most of what information they have and help them understand and create the information they really need.

McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Content Management>Planning

Getting to Expert

The gaps in your documentation aren’t there because you haven’t consider a particular level of user; the gaps in your documentation are there because you haven’t considered how one level of user becomes another. How DO you get from Beginner to Expert?

McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Technical Writing

Testing Documentation

As part of the product, testing documentation seems like an obvious thing to do, but what does it really mean? I’ve fielded the question in a few different places now and it’s always interesting to delve deeper and understand the rationale behind the request.

McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Documentation>Assessment>Testing

Driving Development

By partly adopting the process suggested by Daniel Brolund we, the technical writing team, can be involved right up front and the documentation can be one of the methods used to validate the software as it is being built.

McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Documentation>Writing>Technical Writing

Revisiting the Basics 

There are some fundamentals tenets of our profession that are widely accepted. One being that you always need to know your audience before y can begin to understand their needs and so produce the information that they require.

McLean, Gordon. One Man Writes (2008). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing