Are there still career opportunities for really good technical writers who are writers exclusively? Are companies and institutions still willing to pay for craftsmanship in technical writing?

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There are many times I have to explain what I do to people outside our field because the term Information Architect is foreign to most (except IT folks). At some point in the conversation I resort to the Lego analogy to explain my job responsibilities but I realize that the analogy is a little short of the total picture. An information architect...

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Kai Weber tells a dramatic story about the long-term costs of shifting the responsibility for documentation to test and development. The next chapter of the story might be even more dramatic.

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You're probably saying to yourself, Am I in the right blog? You are. One of the things I see in this business are companies who hear about DITA and the benefits of an XML-based publication system and say, Yes, verily. Make it so! They believe that it's just a matter of taking their current content and converting it to DITA and they're done. ...

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Today I answer interview questions from Ugur Akinci in his Technical Communication Center blog.  I talk about my career, the current state of technical communication, and why I got into the profession.

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I heard this song this morning and it got me thinking about things. The big question that I had to answer for myself had nothing to do with my personal relationships but with my career. It's a simple question that everyone needs to answer at one point or another. Why are they in their chosen field? The basic answer is because they love what the...

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I'll admit it quite readily. More often than not, I'll recommend to clients that they should convert to DITA. I'll also recommend in most cases, the task, concept and reference model DITA provides fits their needs. I'll usually not constrain those models or use DTD shells for a client because I'm of the mind that somewhere along the line the client...

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