Web
2 Methods to Avoid Gender Ambiguity
One of the hardest things in writing English is to avoid using the third person singular pronouns, unless you are writing for an exclusively male or female group. Every time I see a document with a sentence like “the operator must configure his or her machine according to…” I cringe. Some writers switch back and…
Read MoreTechnical versus Content Writing
Technical versus content writing — are they the same or different? The answer is YES and NO. It is similar to content or article writing in the sense that you need to create prose that is easily understood, logically consistent, and conveys useful information. Where it separates from regular non-fiction writing is in its procedural…
Read MoreEbook Self-Publishing Alternatives: Amazon Kindle, Moodle, Tizra
Every week I hear about yet another self-publishing alternative platform. Today I had the chance to have a look at Tizra.com and wanted to compare it to Kindle and Moodle, two of my favorite publishing platforms. KINDLE (http://kdp.amazon.com/) The advantage of Kindle is obvious: where else can you expose your content to millions of daily…
Read MoreHow to Configure the Web Settings of your MS Word Document
Did you know that you can save your MS Word 2010 documents as HTML web pages? TIP: Actually this is one of the ways in which you can easily transform your Word document into Amazon Kindle documents. For that purpose, save your Word file as “Web Page, Filtered” before importing it as an HTML file…
Read MoreThree Options to Save a MS Word Page as an HTML Web Page
© Ugur Akinci Granted, no professional web designer would use MS Word to design a web page. There are much better tools for that out there like the mother-of-all-HTM-editors DreamWeaver. However, there are also times when you may not have ready access to a web designer or when you’d like to post up a page…
Read MoreHow to Write Blog Comments that will Get Published
The chances are you’re reading a number of blogs like this one throughout the day and leaving comments with the hope that they will get published. Leaving comments have a two-fold purpose: 1) To contribute to the ongoing discussion, and 2) To get backlinks to your own website unless the site owner has turned on…
Read MoreGoogle Chrome Tutorial — Information Design at its Finest
© 2010 Ugur Akinci Have you seen this cartoon-style tutorial by Google Chrome? It’s one of the finest examples of information design that I’ve seen. It’s perfectly tuned to its intended audience (geeks age 16-36), is easy to follow, and chops down important concepts into easy-to-swallow visual chunks. http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html
Read MoreMake Sure your Images Broadcast the Right Message about you & your business
A web site must reflect the correct image about you and your business with its design, color pallet, content, and also the IMAGES used. Sometimes I’m surprised how careless some web site owners are in the message they are broadcasting with the images they choose. Here is the web site of a writing service. I…
Read MoreTechnical Book Review – THE COMPASS: Essential Reading About XML, DITA, and Web 2.0
© 2010 Ugur Akinci Here is a mighty little volume by Scriptorium.com that should be mandatory reading for all those either brand new to structured authoring or looking for technical details about DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) OT (Open Toolkit) and PDF generation. The last chapter on “Web 2.0 in Technical Communication” is also good…
Read MoreThe Lessons I Learned from SPAM Writers
© 2010 Ugur Akinci I receive a lot of SPAM. 99.9% is caught by my fantastic spam filter (Akismet). Before I delete SPAM messages, I read some of them and find the exercise very educational. I have no idea why these parties keep sending me tens of thousands of SPAM messages a year. But every…
Read More