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Writing good technical documentation, part 3

Posted Tuesday, July 21, 2009 9:45 PM by Jeanie Decker
(Part 2) (Part 1) Nathan Bransford, a literary agent, blogged about his difficulty in getting writers to paste their original query into their partial manuscript . Here are the instructions he sends them: "Thank you for your recent note. Would you mind Read More...
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Writing good technical documentation, part 2

Posted Monday, March 09, 2009 8:54 PM by Jeanie Decker
(Part 1) Joel Spolsky has an excellent post on the role of the program manager . I work with program managers, so I read through it comparing his descriptions with the PMs I've known. Then I got to the part on functional specifications and my interest Read More...
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Writing good technical documentation, part 1

Posted Tuesday, January 06, 2009 10:40 PM by Jeanie Decker
A recent comment by "BPM software" suggested that I write about best practices for writing technical documentation. I thought about it for awhile and decided I couldn't really do it justice in one post - hence, "part 1". I'll begin by plagiarizing myself Read More...
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How not to write a user manual

Posted Monday, April 21, 2008 7:52 PM by Jeanie Decker
I have to disagree with Tony Soper's admiration for the Pong user instructions: "Insert quarter Ball will automatically serve Avoid missing ball for high score" Tony and I worked together on the same team, so he's used to my contrariness. :-) I don't Read More...
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Web vs. print challenges

Posted Friday, September 07, 2007 10:12 AM by Jeanie Decker
If you took a look at the DPM 2007 Operations Guide during the beta, you might have noticed that the server chapters have a similar organization: general maintenance management data recovery And within those sections are parallel topics, such as: renaming Read More...
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It's worth your during

Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007 2:10 PM by Jeanie Decker
I know, you're tired of hearing about difficulties translating the american-english language. Still, when I encounter such an amusing example, I just have to share... They didn’t care about my schedule, offering only general remarks about making it “worth Read More...
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Task-based documentation

Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007 11:52 AM by Jeanie Decker
I'm packing up for the WritersUA Conference with great anticipation. It's a bit of a busman's holiday for me. Lately I've been immersed in the technical aspects of what I was writing about, so it's a pleasure to step back from that and think about the Read More...
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Those pesky computer innards

Posted Wednesday, February 14, 2007 8:42 AM by Jeanie Decker
This was a headline this morning on msnbc.com: IBM says it has doubled speed of computer innards . Of course that got my attention -- did IBM really say "innards"? No innards in the story. "IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on Read More...
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Microsoft language, in a cloud

Posted Thursday, January 11, 2007 9:19 PM by Jeanie Decker
This is only tangentially related to technical writing, but a post by Matthew Stibbe brought to my attention an interesting analysis of Microsoft language over the years. It's an interactive tag cloud , covering 1976 to 2006, on Todd Bishop's Microsoft Read More...
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How to write really bad instructions

Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 8:02 PM by Jeanie Decker
This evening, trying to assemble a pressure-mounted baby gate for my dog, I picked up several tips and tricks for writing really bad instructions that I just have to share for everyone's edification: Only name half of the parts in the diagram. Users enjoy Read More...
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How to add RAM to a laptop

Posted Saturday, September 09, 2006 8:12 PM by Jeanie Decker
Over the years, I think I've replaced just about everything inside my desktops except the motherboard. But I've never even peeked inside my laptop. Somehow I absorbed the edict that only "authorized technicians" could touch one. I had this extra memory Read More...
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Bullfighter for writing

Posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006 6:08 PM by Jeanie Decker
Matthew Stibbe's review of the Bullfighter add-on for Word and PowerPoint intrigued me enough to try it. It's a quick and easy install that adds a toolbar to the applications. I decided to test it against my most recent doc, What's New in Data Protection Read More...
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Learn from nonexamples

Posted Thursday, July 20, 2006 9:30 AM by Jeanie Decker
I think that content at Microsoft has gotten better over the years at providing examples. Examples are a good thing. What we still tend to overlook are non examples. Nonexamples can be as effective, or even more effective, for learning. They provide an Read More...
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The system tray that never was

Posted Wednesday, July 19, 2006 10:29 AM by Jeanie Decker
In a a recent post , The Old New Thing made reference to terminology errors, citing the system tray as an example. To quote: "One of the most common errors is to refer to the Taskbar Notification Area as the "tray" or the "system tray". This has never Read More...
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Development, the microscopic view

Posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 9:18 AM by Jeanie Decker
Whether it's software or content, making a change can often be a much bigger deal than you'd think. I was reading The Best Software Writing I , selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky , and came across a delightful essay on that very topic. It was from Read More...
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