Archive for September 2009
How Reliable is Your “Reference Data”?
Before the Crisis of 2008 hit, main mortgage brokers on the Wall Street were confident of the way they were running their business. Their software programs were written by crackerjack developers from top Ivy League schools. When they fed their sub-prime lending numbers into these programs, the result was “positive.” After a year of monitoring,…
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How to Write a Quality Control Plan (QCP) — Part 1
Introduction Quality Control Plan (QCP) is an important document for those hoping to secure a U.S. government contract. A quality control plan is a document that ensures the safety and accuracy of a product. Quality control plans can be applied to any type of project, from building houses to developing new software. A quality control…
Read MoreFrameMaker Tip: How to Copy Formats Between Chapters of a Book
© 2009 Ugur Akinci Imagine you have a FrameMaker Book with 50 chapters. Just before you generate a PDF and distribute it to the client, your client (or manager) showed up with a last-minute demand: you have to change all the Document Title, Part Number and Release Date information in the FOOTER. And you have…
Read MoreARGUMENT: Why Technical Writers Shouldn't Be "Writers"
Excerpts: Technical writers love the written word. Perhaps, we love it a little too much? We need to ask ourselves is the written word the best thing for documentation? Is it the best thing for us as an industry, and is it the best thing for you as a content developer. Over the last several…
Read MoreSTC Releases 2008 Annual U.S. Salary Survey of Technical Writers
STC (Society for Technical Communication) has released its 109-page comprehensive 2008 Annual U.S. Salary Survey, available free of charge to STC members. In the email that introduced the survey, STC acknowledged the hits our profession received in 2008. But then, which profession did not suffer during the last year? So we have to place such…
Read MoreNew Cities in China = More Technical Writers
© 2010 Ugur Akinci We are living in a rapidly urbanizing world which means there’ll be more need than ever for techncial writers who can make sense of technology and who can explain technical procedures to others in plain language. United States has only 9 cities with population over a million and some, like Detroit,…
Read MoreWhat is "Cloud Computing"?
© 2009 Ugur Akinci Technical communicators need to stay abreast of developments in the IT field. “Cloud Computing” is one such development that’s taking the world by storm right now. It’s the way commercial giants like Google, eBay, and Amazon are handling their data and juggling their enormous system loads. Cloud computing is an example…
Read MoreWrite for Niche Markets to Earn More
© 2009-2010 Ugur Akinci We live in a world of specialization and specialists always earn more. There are neighborhood car mechanics who fix any old car and those who repair only Jaguars, BMWs and Porches. Guess who charges more? Your family doctor may know a lot about a number of different diseases. There’s also your…
Read MoreDocument Menu of Adobe "Writer" (Professional)
I know — the good and hard-working folks over at Adobe do not like me refer to Adobe Professional as “Writer” but there are 2 good reasons why I do so: 1) “Writer” is a term well-established within the technical writing community. Every tech writer I know refers to Adobe Professional as “Adobe Writer.” I’m…
Read MoreHow to Write a Software Installation Guide
© 2009-2010 Ugur Akinci An installation guide is written to describe the installation of either a mechanical/electronics system (like a child’s swing or a hi-fi set) or a software product. Here we will focus mainly on the latter. A software installation guide overlaps with System Administration Guide since it covers similar configuration tasks. That’s the…
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