It's been a while since I've shared a few thoughts with you all. I've been a bit busy, some of it my own doing and some not, but that's not the purpose of this article. My purpose is to bring out a point about validating information before publishing. To give an example of how missing information, I'm going to use a scene from a movie as an exampl...

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I appreciate news stories that are written knowledgeably, dispassionately, and in a way that common people can understand. In that sense, they're like technical communication at its best. To paraphrase Kipling, technical communicators keep our heads when all about us are losing theirs.

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My article in this month's Indus (the STC India chapter newsletter) explores three trends for the decade of the 2010s: community-based content and the rise of content strategy, more media and devices, and continued commoditization of technical writing—along with an emphasis on proving value.

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Maybe it's not magic, quite. But technical writers possess a skill set that's pretty special. And sometimes what we do is close to magic. That's worth celebrating.

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Larry Kunz has been busy lately.Not only is he blogging here, but he's also written something about tech com trends for STC India. Larry has discussed content curation and collaboration in many posts. In my mind, he's one of the evangelists for both of these areas within our community and I applaud his efforts. However, I recently ...

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A help system that pleases every user. Would it be too much to call this the holy grail of technical writing? To reach it, let's follow the lead of science fiction writers who invite us to envision an ideal and leave the details to others.

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Before I begin, let me set some context. Although I'm Hispanic, my Spanish is not that great, so that I have all the same challenges most American tourists have when visiting Spain if they haven't taken time to get a conversational level of the language. It's not something I'm proud of, but it does sometimes leads to some interesting situ...

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