Technical Writing
Technical Communication Certificate Program at NOVA, Northern Virginia
© Ugur Akinci Here is yet another Technical Communication Certificate Program at NOVA, Northern Virginia Community College. “Professional Writing for Business, Government, and Industry Certificate“ The NOVA catalog reads: “This certificate program prepares participants to write with expertise in professional contexts. The curriculum provides skills needed by currently employed or potential writers in business, government, and…
Read MoreHow to Write an Autoresponder Series of Email Letters
What is an Autoresponder? Autoresponder series of email letters are a set of pre-written emails that have been created to be delivered in a specific order. The goal is to deliver compelling content or offers without the time commitment of writing and sending each one manually. They have been used by companies for the purpose…
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How to Design a Document Revision History Template
Introduction A document revision history template can help you to make sure that your documents are always up to date and error-free. Designing a Document Revision History Template 1. Include the current date and time in your document revision history template. 2. Include the name of the person who made the changes in the revision…
Read MoreAdobe FrameMaker 12 User Interface Options
© Ugur Akinci Adobe FrameMaker 12 comes with three different user interface options: Unstructured Structured XML All these options offer the user a different default menu bar but the very same starter screen. How to select an interface When you first launch FrameMaker 12, the program displays the following dialog box: Select one of the above options…
Read MoreAdobe FrameMaker 12 Default Document Templates
Adobe FrameMaker has not been a product in the past that offered a wealth of attractive templates to use. For some reason FM developers have not considered the lack of templates a great issue even though it was. I have known quite a few technical writers who kept generating one average looking document after another (or shifted…
Read MoreFrameMaker – RoboHelp Integration – when to preserve modifications to a RoboHelp file?
© Ugur Akinci If you prepare your source files in FrameMaker and then import (or rather, link) them to a RoboHelp project like I do, there is one feature that you should pay attention to. When you bring in a source file and then save it in RH, the application displays the following warning message:…
Read MoreHow to Write About Changing Contexts in Procedural Task Steps
© Ugur Akinci In using software, the context changes frequently depending on the actions we take. For example, when we click a command button, a new window might open. Or when we select a specific option from a drop-down menu, the system may display a new dialog box in a new tab. A new window,…
Read MoreQ&A: "What is the difference Between a User Guide and a System Admin Guide?"
READER QUESTION: I’m working on a software product that has a GUI. Currently, we have a user guide and a system administration guide. The user guide mainly focuses on tasks that can be done thru the GUI; the admin guide mainly focuses on system maintenance and administration. However, there’s no distinguishing line between the two…
Read MoreHow to Create and Use Autotext Building Blocks in a MS Word 2010 Document
There may be cases when you’d like to use the very same MS Word text snippet, or “boilerplate text”, repeatedly in different documents. Wouldn’t be nice just to insert the same frequently-used text automatically rather than copy-pasting, or worse, rewriting it? You can accomplish that easily with MS Word’s Autotext Building Block feature. What a…
Read MoreTCC Selected Recommended Blog 2014
We are very happy that Indoition again selected us one of the best technical communication blogs out there, giving us the right and privilege to display the BEST OF icon: We thank all our readers, sponsors and contributors for making us one of the most widely-read technical communication blogs over the years.
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