Online Video Courses

Technical Writing – How to Use Twitter to Market Yourself As a Technical Writer

By Ugur Akinci | February 7, 2009

If you’re to make a single change in the way you market your services as a freelance technical writer, it should be to get on the Twitter – in case you still haven’t. It’s addictive, informative, and fun too. Twitter is a free social networking service through which you can exchange 140-character messages with the…

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Do You Just "Shutdown" Or "Shut Down" a System? "Sign In" Or "Sign-In"?

By Ugur Akinci | February 6, 2009

There are terminology errors in technical writing that even some experienced technical writers commit from time to time. The words we use when describing how to turn a system on and off, or how to enter and leave a location, are ripe for such inadvertent errors. Here are the basics: “Shutdown” is a noun. “Shut…

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Technical Writing – How to Use the PDF Format Correctly for Print and Online Publications

By Ugur Akinci | February 6, 2009

PDF (which stands for “Portable Document Format”) is one of the most widely used document formats in technical writing. PDF rose out of a real need to read documents created by proprietary software on all kinds of different operating systems and browsers. An advertisement illustration created by Illustrator could not be viewed by the receiver…

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Anatomy of a Technical Editing Process

By Ugur Akinci | February 6, 2009

Here is the anatomy of a technical editing process. This ORIGINAL SENTENCE is from a software user’s guide: “A prompt will occur prior to deletion that confirms the operator’s wish to delete the selected item and once confirmation occurs the deletion is made final.” Here is a BETTER version: “A warning message displays, prompting the…

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