Technical Writing
A Perspective on Technical and Content Writing in India – Part II
By Nikhil Khandekar Special for TCC Content Developer, India (Continues from Part I) In India, technical communication was introduced by the emergence of IT in the 1990s. Our mathematical and scientific acumen for all things IT was what led to our stumbling onto technical communication. Stumble we had to; there was no working our way…
Read MoreA Perspective on Technical and Content Writing in India – Part I
By Nikhil Khandekar Special for TCC Content Developer, India The biggest challenge that the development of technical communication and documentation faces in India is the general and perceived lack of facility with the English language. Website content, email communication, documentation, and even books and articles produced in India suffer a bias in the Western mind…
Read MoreHow to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain
How to Create Technical Manuals and Help Files with Dr.Explain I heard about Dr.Explain only recently. It’s a great layout and text editor for creating all kinds of technical manuals and help files. Especially for dedicated MS Word users, it offers a wealth of options, including the ability to capture automatically-annotated screenshots that even RoboHelp…
Read MoreNew Video Online Course: "Learn Plain Writing Today!"
© Ugur Akinci We are happy and pronounce our newest online video course: Learn plain writing from a veteran writer with over 15 years of hi-tech Fortune 100 experience. Learn the basics of communicating in plain English for maximum success and productivity in your business and personal life. What’s more, if you happen to work…
Read MoreSome words frequently misspelled by computer scientists
“Some words frequently misspelled by computer scientists: implement not impliment complement not compliment occurrence not occurence dependent not dependant auxiliary not auxillary feasible not feasable preceding not preceeding referring not refering category not catagory consistent not consistant PL/I not PL/1 descendant (noun) not descendent its (belonging to it) not it’s (it is)” FROM: …
Read More"Tech Writing Handbook" by iFixit
© Ugur Akinci Here is a “Tech Writing Handbook” for beginner technical writers. It’s very visual, pretty, looks great. Has high eye-candy value. It also covers the basics nicely. http://www.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing However, if you’d like to go deeper and learn more about all these topics while doing exercises, answering quizzes, and writing a User Guide…
Read MoreMathematical Writing: A Great Style Guide for Technical Writers
If you are writing scientific papers with a lot of math equations you may want to have a look at the following style guideline: http://tex.loria.fr/typographie/mathwriting.pdf Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts This report is based on a course of the same name given at Stanford University. Here is a…
Read MoreHow to Insert an Independent Numbering Sequence into a MS Word 2007 Technical Document with SEQ Field Numbering Code
© Ugur Akinci Imagine you would like to insert a series of “POINT TO REMEMBER” notes into your technical document. But there are three tough conditions to meet: These notes are not styled with any of the existing paragraph styles. You want them to be numbered sequentially: “POINT 1 TO REMEMBER”, “POINT 2 TO REMEMBER”, etc. When…
Read MoreHow to Apply Multilevel Numbering to MS Word Tables
© Ugur Akinci Imagine you have the following document: You would like to insert TABLES to this text but number them starting with the multilevel number of the section they are in. For example, you want the tables placed in section number “2” as “Table 2-a”, “Table 2-b”, “Table 2-c” and not simply as…
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How to Manage Signal Versus Noise in Technical Documents
Introduction Signal versus noise is an interesting and important issue in technical communication. Here is an uncomfortable fact of technical document management: as much as we’d like to base our decisions on hard evidence and numbers, we still make a number of judgment calls that rest on nothing more than a seat-of-the-pants “this feels okay,”…
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