Here’s the scenario: You’re finishing up your latest HTML Help project…no more late nights or weekends…back to a “normal” 50-hour work week. That’s when the development team lead strolls into your ...

Editor’s Note: The following piece, by Jean Hollis Weber, is part of our collection of “classics”–articles that stand the test of time no matter how many technologies come and go. Don’t forget to ...

At this point in this series, I am going to start looking at the algorithms of structured writing. An algorithm is a formalized method for performing a task. We often associate algorithms with ...

My recent book, Implementing Onscreen Editing (Hart 2019), recounts my personal experience with two onscreen editing implementations (Hart 2011, 2012), and summarizes two important papers that ...

I once received a long writing sample from a technical communication applicant who had written about a complex medical device. The sample demonstrated all the marks of quality: clean and consistent ...

One of my former students writes for a healthcare products company. Recently, his colleagues asked him to deliver a workshop for them about writing. We had a long conversation on how he prepared this ...

At some point in your technical writing career, you may find yourself in a position where you are responsible not only for your own output, but also the output of other writers under you. In other ...

Most technical communicators have worked for employers that mistook activity for productivity and have tried to teach our bosses the difference between churning out words and crafting useful ...

In the modern “fake news” era, “facts” are increasingly flexible rather than tangible, provable, stable things. People increasingly accept opinions and gut feelings as more valid than expert knowledge ...

The process of creating and delivering content consists of translating ideas (stuff someone thinks or knows) into concrete physical form that can be read (dots of ink or pixel on a page or screen).

Few readers read content straight though. Unless the content is perfectly matched to their experience and their goals, they reach points where they need more information, points where they need less, ...

In my 30 years as an editor and technical writer, I’ve seen endless examples of how readers can misinterpret texts. In the most egregious cases, I’ve even seen authors misinterpret their own writing, ...