Technical Writing – Combine Short Sentences to Avoid Choppy Delivery
© 2010 Ugur Akinci Most of the time you’ll hear that short is good in technical writing and long is bad. That’s true in general. But like everything else, this rule has an exception as well. If you write in too many short sentences cascading one after the other, the readers will have a hard…
Read MoreTwo Excellent Reasons Why You Should Learn XML
© 2010 Ugur Akinci There are two excellent reasons why you should learn XML as a technical communicator, both argued well by Jabin White at his seminal post “XML is Here to Say (I Promise)“. The first reason is: XML is platform and application independent. When you create an XML-tagged document, what you’re creating is…
Read MoreWrite Your Technical Documents with a Consistent Style Guideline
© 2010 Ugur Akinci A consistent technical document is one that instills confidence and trust in end-users. It all starts with a template. It doesn’t matter whether you are creating a book, help file, or a web site. A template is a must. Once you’ve got your template designed and under control, you need to…
Read MoreUse Case and the Importance of Storytelling in Technical Documentation
© 2010 Ugur Akinci Software and hardware developers are well-educated intelligent engineers who usually have no difficulty at all in creating products. The real difficulty in product development is not the question of “how” (as in “how can we build this?”) but “what” (as in “what shall this product do?”). Just like in screenwriting, the…
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