Absence May Make the Heart Grow Fonder, But...

The adage 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' may hold true. Many people in long-distance relationships say that the being away from their partner makes the time they are together special; every day they are together is like Valentine's Day. The absence, they say, helps them to appreciate their partner more and makes the relationship stronger. In fact, people in long-distance relationships tend to maintain their relationships longer, be less likely to break up, and be more in love and satisfied than people in geographically close relationships. Long-distance partners think fond thoughts and some even report they enjoy the anticipation of the reunion and the excitement of being together. People in long-distance relationships tend to be more idealized and romanticized.

Stafford, Laura. Communication Currents (2007). Articles>Communication

Accelerated Authoring @ Method M

The Method M blog for technical writers, marketing staff, product managers and others who spend hours each week creating documents. This blog is dedicated to helping you work more efficiently and create better documents.

Reichman, Katriel. Method M (2007). Resources>Documentation>Technical Writing>Blogs

Accessibility Audit vs. Accessibility Testing

Article outlining the difference between the two accessibility evaluation methods: The accessibility audit and accessibility testing.

Moss, Trenton. Webcredible (2007). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Methods

Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA

Our web applications can suffer from inaccessibility problems due to inherent markup limitations. Martin Kliehm helps us sort through the WAI specs for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) to increase usability.

Kliehm, Martin. List Apart, A (2007). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Ajax

Achieving Objectivity Through Genred Activity: A Case Study    

Finding itself at the center of highly publicized legal and political deliberations over fairness in testing, personnel credibility, and legal liability, the training department at a North American transit authority adopted a genre system that enabled the production of objective evidence of job competence, which was then used to make objective decisions about who passed and failed various training programs. The ongoing genre-structured activity of the department involved not only the regularization of organizational texts but also the regularization of social interaction mediated by those texts, which, while producing the types of interpretively stable documents required for successful public deliberation, led to a shift in authority and social relations within the department that instigated considerable resentment and loss of morale among many veteran instructors.

Little, Joseph. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Writing>Instructional Design>Genre

The Achilles Heel of Product Design Competitions and the Fair Judging Solution

I have judged a fair number of national and international product design competitions (five in the past three years alone) and each has made the same procedural mistake: products are assembled and categorized, judging criterion are devised, reputable judges are assembled, and yet we judges never see or touch the products in person. Instead, we receive a set of written documents describing each product, its intended function, and its design process. Imagine an art contest conducted by email and you get the gist of what's going on out there.

Buttiglieri, Rich. Usability Professionals Association (2007). Design>Usability>Assessment

Acquired Disability and Returning to Work: Towards a Stakeholder Approach    

This article examines the potential application of stakeholder theory to the case of a disabled worker returning to work. A gated notion combining both the instrumental and ethical views of stakeholder theory is explored as a way to understand how to determine who may be classified as a stakeholder. This nuanced application of stakeholding to the process of returning to work lends itself to the consideration of mediation techniques as mechanisms of conflict avoidance rather than exclusively as dispute resolution techniques. Implications in terms of the study of the return to work process, disability, and the further potential for practical application are discussed.

Yue, Anthony R. Journal of Workplace Rights (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Accessibility>Workplace

Acronyms Master

Acronyms Master is a free utility for MS Word that automatically creates acronyms table in the document.

Becker, Alex. Acronyms Master (2007). Resources>Software>Word Processing>Microsoft Word

Adapting to Scrum: Challenges and Strategies  

Read about some of the challenges facing technical writers who create product documentation in a Scrum environment, as well as strategies for confronting these challenges.

Sigman, Christine Marini. Intercom (2007). Articles>Project Management>Agile>Scrum

The Added Value Features of Online Scholarly Journals    

Online scholarly journals have become an important tool for the generation of knowledge and the distribution and access to research. The purpose of this article is to analyze the features of online scholarly journals and to determine whether they incorporate new Internet-enabled features and functions which help to meet the needs of the members of the scholarly community more effectively. Drawing on Taylor's concept of added value [1], the features of online scholarly journals were classified into the following types: features which enhance ease of use and facilitate access to data, features that provide selected information and thus reduce noise, features which improve quality, features which address specific user needs, and features which contribute to time or cost savings. The analysis revealed that, although some online journals operate in the same way as print journals, there are others which incorporate innovative features which are transforming the journal to make it a more effective tool for scholarly activity.

Luzón, María José. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Research>Publishing>Online

Advice on Designing Scientific Posters

A scientific poster is a large document that can communicate your research at a scientific meeting, and is composed of a short title, an introduction to your burning question, an overview of your trendy experimental approach, your amazing results, some insightful discussion of aforementioned results, a listing of previously published articles that are important to your research, and some brief acknowledgement of the tremendous assistance and financial support conned from others. If all text is kept to a minimum, a person could fully read your poster in under 10 minutes.

Purrington, Colin. Swarthmore College (2007). Design>Presentations>Posters>Scientific Communication

Afraid to Measure: The State of Communications Accountability

With all the emphasis on ROI of public relations in the so-called 'marketing mix' to increase sales, the communications goals of most leaders and communicators go far beyond public relations ROI connected to sales.

Journal of Leadership Communication Counsel (2007). Articles>Management>Communication>Business Communication

Agile: What is it Anyway?

Agile methodologies have had a lot of press in recent years. To listen to some people, agile methodologies are the answer to all the ailments that have ever plagued software development from the beginning of the computer age. But what are they, really? And do they really deliver on that promise? The answer is: (drumroll, please) it depends.

Little, Karen. BA Collective (2007). Articles>Project Management>Agile>Methods

Ajax for Chat

Learn to build a chat system into your Web application with Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) and PHP. Your customers can talk to you and to each other about the content of the site without having to download or install any special instant-messaging software.

Herrington, Jack D. IBM (2007). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Ajax

Ajax for Lightboxes

In a world where everything is designed to amaze and distract, it's awfully difficult to get a user's attention. Learn how to use new techniques such as lightboxes, pop-ups, windows, and fading messages with your Ajax tools to get your users' eyes on your content.

Herrington, Jack D. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax

Ajax for Lightboxes

In a world where everything is designed to amaze and distract, it's awfully difficult to get a user's attention. Learn how to use new techniques such as lightboxes, pop-ups, windows, and fading messages with your Ajax tools to get your users' eyes on your content.

Herrington, Jack D. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>Ajax

Ajax for Media: Use Ajax Techniques to Show Movies and Slide Shows

With the advent of widely available broadband, media, movies, images, and sound drive the Web 2.0 revolution. Learn to combine media with technologies such as PHP and Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) to create a compelling experience for your customers.

Herrington, Jack D. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>Multimedia>Ajax

Ajax for Ratings and Comments

In the age of the people-powered Web, allowing your readers to rate and review content on your site is critical. Discover just how easy it is to add rating and commenting features to a site with Ajax.

Herrington, Jack D. IBM (2007). Articles>Web Design>Ajax

Ajax for Ratings and Comments

In the age of the people-powered Web, allowing your readers to rate and review content on your site is critical. Discover just how easy it is to add rating and commenting features to a site with Ajax.

Herrington, Jack D. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>Community Building>Ajax

Ajax Tradeoffs: The Many Flavors of XML

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and the idea is that with modern Web browsers you can, with acceptable reliability, keep a channel open to the server to pass data back and forth as your Web application is used. This contrasts with standard Web techniques that follow links, causing the entire page to load anew. Many aspects of Ajax-based development require design different decisions than traditional Web pages: How to manage the back button, how to display updated data, how often to send updates, and more. The focus for now will be on just one group of related aspects: what format should the data exchange take?

Elza, Dethe and David Mertz. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>XML>Ajax

Ajax-Based Persistent Object Mapping

The Persevere persistent object framework brings persistent object mapping to the browser JavaScript environment. Object persistence has seen great popularity in the Java(TM) programming and Ruby worlds, and the dynamic JavaScript language is naturally well suited to mapping objects to persisted data. Persevere automates mapping and communication in Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax)-based Web applications in addition to simplifying much of the development challenge by providing a manageable data model, transparent client-server Ajax interchanges, automatic state change storage, and implicit transaction management.

Zyp, Kristopher William. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>Ajax

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

America the Beautiful

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