Stewart, Cramer, and the Question of Values in Technical Documentation
© Ugur Akinci Did you watch the way Daily Show’s Jon Stewart grilled Mad Money’s Jim Cramer yesterday? It was a trashing well deserved by Jim Cramer in particular, and CNBC in general. As an American citizen who has lost 40% of all his life savings within the last 9 months, I thought it was…
Read MoreHow to Format Your Technical Documents Consistently With a Template
© Ugur Akinci A template is the heart, soul and backbone of any technical or business document. Consistency of documentation is what creates that subliminal sense of trust and confidence in the end-users. Someone once quipped: “it ain’t technical documentation if it ain’t boring.” This of course is not true since I always found technical…
Read MoreGoogle's Translation Service: How Good Is It?
© Ugur Akinci I’m fascinated by Google’s translation service since it promises to translate texts among over three dozen languages, including some quite exotic ones. So I decided to test the reliability of Google’s translation engine by performing a simple test. 1) I took two sentences in English and translated them into a foreign language…
Read MoreTechnical Writing – How to Comply With Moral and Ethical Standards in Technical Documentation
© Ugur Akinci Technical writing has a number of moral and ethical standards that a professional technical writer needs to comply with. Violate them at your own peril, by risking the sudden demise of your career. Here are some of these issues… Plagiarism – Needless to say, copying and pasting other people’s work as yours…
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