STC Lone Writer SIGSTC

Solitary Scrivener

Sarah O’Keefe Answers Your Questions About her Intercom Article

Ken Schatzke (Webmaster)
06 February 2010 		Categories: • Tools of the Trade • Trends
Comments: 0

With the theme “The Lone Advantage: What Big Teams Can Learn from Small Shops”, the December 2009 issue of Intercom featured three articles by, for, and about lone writers. One of these articles, by Sarah O’Keefe, described XML solutions for lone writers. Sarah noted that although XML has traditionally been used by large documentation teams, it can also be used by lone writers with tighter budgets and implementation constraints. Sarah went on to describe a possible roadmap lone writers could adopt to implement XML in their workplaces. This was an invaluable article for any lone writer considering moving to XML.

Sarah answered STC members’ questions about her article in a special post on STC’s Notebook. Check it out!

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Pushing Ourselves Out of the Corner: The Reading List

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
31 December 2009 		Categories: • Career Management
Comments: 2

In the December issue of STC’s Intercom magazine, I mentioned in the conclusion of my article that I’d post a suggested reading list. These are books that I think will take you further into the points I discussed, mainly because they’re books I read in the year(s) leading up to me writing that article (in July).

On Working With Others
Cohen, Allan R. and Bradford, David L. Influence Without Authority. Wiley. 2005.

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. Bantam. 2006.

—————. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Bantam. 2007.

Hart, Geoffrey J. S. “Statecraft: Applying the Science of Politics to Office Politics.” Intercom, September/October 2009.

—————. “When Statecraft Fails: Tips on Surviving the Great Game.” Intercom, November 2009.

Patterson, Kerry, et al. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. McGraw-Hill. 2002.

—————. Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Talking about Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior. McGraw-Hill. 2004.

Sutton, Robert I. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Business Plus. 2007.

Tapping Into Our Core
Dreher, Diane. Your Personal Renaissance: 12 Steps to Finding Your Life’s True Calling. Da Capo Press. 2008.

Lobenstine, Margaret. The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One. Broadway. 2006.

Moore, Thomas. A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do. Broadway. 2009.


Getting Through The Day
Carlson, Richard. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work. Hyperion. 1998.

Rosengren, Curt. 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work. Available from http://www.passioncatalyst.com/101ways/.

Entrepreneurship
Kawasaki, Guy. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything. Portfolio Hardcover. 2004.

Slim, Pamela. Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur. Portfolio Hardcover. 2009.

If you have any to add, please share them in the Comments section!

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Phrases That Tick People Off

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
04 November 2009 		Categories: • Working with Others
Comments: 0

Stuck in traffic one night, I was station surfing on the car radio trying to find a station that was airing something other than ads. I landed on one station in time to hear John Tesh starting to discuss one of the night’s bits of what he calls random intelligence. The list of the moment: the ten most offensive phrases you can use in oral or written communication. Being a writer, I couldn’t help but listen.

The list came from a survey conducted by Meryl Runion at SpeakStrong. In reverse order, the list includes:

The full article on Runion’s Web site briefly describes why each phrase offends, as well as its obnoxiousness rating (as voted on by her readers). If you pillage her newsletter archives, you can find links to other “poison phrases,” such as:

To any of her lists, I would add a word that I think is profoundly obnoxious—“obviously.” I have yet to see or hear “obviously” used in a sentence that a) didn’t sound utterly condescending and b) wouldn’t leave the reader feeling like a big idiot if they didn’t know that which “should be obvious.”

What would you add?

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68 Ways To Shut Down Creativity

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
28 October 2009 		Categories: • Working with Others
Comments: 0

We’ve all had it happen to us at some point in our career. The idea that really lit a fire under us, that recharged our enthusiasm, that prompted us to spend our free time researching. The idea that was our chance to introduce something new that would save time, save money, help users, open doors to new opportunities for ourselves, our employers, our customers. The idea that we were sure people could easily agree to.

Until we talked to a manager—especially a skeptical one.

Technical writers run into more than their fair share of these brick walls. Changing technologies and newly discovered best practices give us ample opportunity to come up with new ideas and better ways of helping our users. And each new idea is another opportunity to run into a yes or a no or a maybe.

I’ve been blessed with managers who said yes more often than not, and with managers who were generous with maybe, usually telling me “You’ve piqued my interest. I have some questions; come back with the answers in a week and we’ll see where to go from there.” And I’ve had managers who couldn’t muster even a maybe, whose responses consistently alternated between the following:

  1. We’re not ready for that. 
  2. It will never work.
  3. Who will do it? (or, If you do it, will I have to take something else of yours and reassign it to someone who will have to be trained?)
  4. Dead silence

It turns out there’s at least 64 other creativity-killing stock responses. James Lukaszewski wrote out the list in an article for The Public Relations Strategist, titled “You Can’t Be Serious!: Responses That Stifle Creativity.” (The link leads to a PDF file, so be patient while Acrobat loads.)

The list was written with the intent that it would serve as a reference to things to avoid saying altogether. But it also can serve as a useful tool to help bulletproof pitches and create counter-responses beforehand.

How many of these have you been on the receiving end of? And how did you deal with them?

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Contemplating Help

Ken Schatzke (Webmaster)
20 August 2009 		Categories: • Tools of the Trade • Trends • Writing
Comments: 0

I’ve been working on a fairly major help project over the past few weeks. In the process, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, as tech writers, write help and what users need from help.

I was first introduced to help authoring 12 years ago while completing my degree in technical writing. Like most tech writers, I learned about books, topics, indexes, keywords, and the other components of help files. I also learned the best practices of help authoring, including breaking information into small, self-contained chunks, keeping information types separate, and focusing on user tasks rather than software features. Although HTML-based authoring tools and outputs were available at the time, publishing help on the web was still a novel idea.

After graduating, I began creating help systems in the real world. Often, this meant porting the content from a product’s printed user guide to an online platform (HTML Help, HTML, PDF, etc.) with few, if any, structural changes. This was my primary work flow for many years. And I suspect it was the primary work flow of other tech writers as well.

While we worked on user guides and help, our users’ world changed dramatically. Internet access became nearly ubiquitous in the developed world. Google made searching the web faster and easier. Blogs, wikis, and YouTube made user-generated content a reality.

What does this all mean for help? Is it even relevant in a world where users can simply search the web for thousands of free resources when they have a question or encounter a problem with their software products? I think help can still be relevant. In fact, it needs to be relevant to engage our users and allow them to fully realize the value of their tools and technology. But this requires us, as tech writers, to move beyond the basic lessons that I learned in college over a decade ago:

Many of you are already following these practices. Please share your experiences with us.

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Marketing and Tech Writers

Ken Schatzke (Webmaster)
06 August 2009 		Categories: • Documentation Management • Working with Others
Comments: 0

In a recent post on his blog, Neil Perlin noted that business and financial knowledge is critical to the success of tech writers. This is particularly true for tech writers working by themselves or in small teams who need to justify the hiring of new writers or the purchase of new software.

Marketing is an area of business that many tech writers, myself included, don’t fully understand or appreciate. That’s why I found this video of Seth Godin from the 2008 Business of Software conference interesting. While Godin’s talk is geared towards software developers, it has implications for tech writers as well.

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Free Teleclasses In The Upcoming Weeks

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
19 June 2009 		Categories: • Career Management
Comments: 1

A long-time acquaintance of mine, Curt Rosengren, just wrote to tell me that he’s offering a couple of free one-hour teleclasses in the coming two weeks.

If you’ve not yet heard of Curt, or heard me talk about him, he’s a self-admitted Professional Malcontent turned Passion Catalyst, having pulled himself out of an unfulfilling corporate career and planted himself into a new life path that re-introduced passion, and near-euphoria, into his professional and personal lives. Through his Passion Catalyst coaching business, he’s helped countless others find their own ways out of malcontent. I discovered him through his original blog, Occupational Adventure, and have continued to follow him through his newest blog, the M.A.P. Maker. M.A.P. Maker is a self-required daily read for me, and I continue to trawl his Occupational Adventure archives and share the gems I find with friends and colleagues.

If you find yourself caught in a period of personal or professional frustration, suffocation, or desperation, time with Curt in one of his classes or in one-on-one sessions invariably helps people start reconnecting with their dreams and with themselves.

Whether you attend the teleclasses or not, I encourage you to also check out his books:

If you get the latter book, be careful about bringing it to work as co-workers will quickly develop the habit of helping themselves to your copy.

 

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Well, This Is What We’ve Been Saying For Years

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
28 May 2009 		Categories: • Working with Others
Comments: 1

TechRepublic recently posted an article titled, 10 ways developers can meet user expectations and ease frustrations. The list included things like accurate data, responsive user interfaces, compatibility, responsible resource consumption, and others. Being a technical writer, #7—Documentation, naturally caught my attention:

We all know how much developers dislike writing documentation. So we tell ourselves that the application is so easy to use, “only an idiot would need a manual.” There are two problems with this thinking. The first is that the world has plenty of idiots in it. The second is that we are usually wrong about how easy the application is to use. If your organization has a technical writer to create the documentation, involve that person from the get-go; the top complaint I hear from technical writers is that they are handed a nearly finished product and told to document it, with little insight into how it actually should be used. If you do not have a technical writer available, you will really need to work hard to make sure that the documentation does not merely state the obvious and is written in a way that will be helpful to end users who are unfamiliar with your application.

I’ve been at this for more than a decade and it mystifies me that this point STILL has to be drummed into the heads of managers and development teams. Or that #10 on TechRepublic’s list—Does what it says it will—has to be either. With all the blogs out there that crucify products that are anything but user-friendly, and with help desk call databases documenting the “how do I….?” calls that come in over and over again, it shouldn’t be such an epiphany that users have no patience for products that

So, instead of burying this discussion on our SIG listserv or the Discussion Board of our LinkedIn Group, let’s get it out in the open for everyone to read. What’s the reason—or reasons—for this persistent block? What’s the “magical sales pitch” that you, fellow tech writers, think will help clear the blocks once and for all?

 

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Contemplating Natural Talent

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
21 May 2009 		Categories: • Career Management
Comments: 3

While catching up on some reading in my RSS aggregator, I discovered a post that Tom Johnson wrote about Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers.” About an hour later, while looking at Seth Godin’s blog feed, I discovered he’d responded to Gladwell’s book back in December.

Reading both of them, and having a strong reaction to both, prompted me to pull “Outliers” out of the middle of my to-read stack and read it. In arguing that natural talent isn’t much more than a myth, Gladwell states that:

  * Your success is greatly determined by where and when you were born.
  * Superstardom is achieved with 10,000 hours of hard work.
  * Where you were born + when you were born + working 10,000 hours (or more) > (is greater than) natural talent.

I know people with natural talent at something who’ve never gone anywhere with it because they lacked ambition and possessed an aversion to (or fear of) hard work. I know people who created extraordinary lives for themselves with their talent. There’s little doubt in my mind that work and experience can help you hone and harness natural talent. But it can’t replace it. Maybe I’ve hung around too many musicians and artists, but I believe there’s an intangible “something” that natural talent brings to the equation that simply cannot be matched by learned skill.

Talent exists at a cellular level. It affects how you experience the world with your five senses. Natural talent frames, from the start, how you see the world and all that’s in it. It frames how you process information for your own understanding, how you interpret what you see, how you transform what you know into something that the world—or some part thereof—can subsequently use. Natural talent overrides many of the objections to pursuing an activity that someone not similarly talented would have to beginning the pursuit. Someone with talent for neurosurgery has no reservations about the years of education, training, expense, and sacrifice that are required to become a surgeon. Someone who is capable of learning to be a surgeon—but who lacks a natural talent for it—would be overwhelmed by the work and not interested in pursuing it.

To say that something can be achieved with hours upon hours upon hours upon hours of hard work, and not so much by natural talent, is an oversimplification of a complex human process that is driven by intelligence, creativity, emotion, psychology, desire, and so on. A person born with a gift for language and communication, even with 10,000 hours of work, will not be nearly as effective in a career in biostatistics as they would be in a career that calls upon their talents. Using his logic, I could have been a successful computer programmer except that I would have been miserable at a personal level, because I would have been doing something that ran counter to the gifts I was born with. I didn’t enjoy my programming courses. I worked hard for the grades I got and felt out of my element. Sure, I could have stuck with it, overcome initial challenges, and made a living at it.

But I didn’t want to.

Which brings me back to my earlier point—that natural talent drives desire, fuels passion, feeds energy, defines goals, maps a course. It makes Gladwell’s 10,000 hours look manageable, not insurmountable. It makes challenges look like welcome creative opportunities. It makes Gladwell’s 10,000 hours look like a darn fine way to spend a life.

To deny the importance—even the existence—of natural talent is to devalue the singular contributions made by the people through whom ideas and visions and theories came. It is to say that anyone could have done what Albert Einstein did, that anyone could have seen the world in the same way that he did—he simply got there first.

What Gladwell’s book should offer all of us is another opportunity for self-reflection, the kind that Tom Johnson openly engaged in on his blog. An opportunity to recount and document our individual journeys, the crossroads we’ve navigated, the decisions that we regret or revel in. A “how did I get here from there” analysis can make us more comfortable with and accepting of who we are, where we are, the decisions we’ve made, the value we offer, and where we are headed. If it doesn’t lead to greater self-acceptance, it should lead to greater self-awareness. Such analysis can dispel any victim myths we may have been telling ourselves (and, likely, others), where we’ve been too passive, where we’ve clearly been “working in flow” (read: on our path), and what things make our hearts sing or sink. It can illustrate for us whether we need a course correction.

This lifeline/timeline analysis is one that every career and life coach makes you do when you go to them to “sort things out.” In Tom’s case, his analysis proved to be a validation that he is where he wants to be and, maybe, is “supposed” to be. For others, the analysis may lead to an entirely different conclusion about their own lives. In either case, the folks doing this analysis become more conscious of what they’re doing, thereby kicking themselves off auto-pilot. Extending the analysis to look at the activities and decisions of people we respect and admire—without comparing ourselves to them—and being aware of our reactions to them is almost as telling as self-reflection. Does watching a former colleague turn being laid off into a launching pad for their own business or career change stir up envy, or old dreams and goals of your own? Or does it help you reaffirm why you’re content—consciously content—with where you are and what you’re doing?

Like Seth Godin, I may not always agree with Gladwell but I can always count on him to provoke thought, to make me, if not change my beliefs and opinions, reaffirm to myself why I formed them in the first place.

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Writer’s Toolkit: Cleaning The Crap Off Your PC

Whitney Potsus (SIG Manager)
05 May 2009 		Categories: • Writers Toolkit
Comments: 0

Years ago, when we launched Scrivener as a newsletter, we had a regular feature called “Writer’s Toolkit,” which was a sampling of the tricks, tips, and tools that were shared on the SIG listserv. (Grant Hogarth, a senior member of both the STC and our SIG, was by far the most frequent contributor.) It’s a feature worth reviving for the blog.

While cleaning out my overstuffed mail folders, I found dozens of Toolkit-worthy e-mails that I’ve been saving. One such group of e-mails was about cleaning junk off your hard drive and clearing out unnecessary processes. Listed below are the tools that were recommended, and one resource site:

I can vouch for the freeware program CCleaner, which is a great tool for routine cleaning of your drive, particularly after you’ve been on the Web for any length of time. You can have it search for the whole default list of garbage-file generators, or some customizable subset thereof. It also scans for and repairs Registry problems. It installs quickly, updates quickly, and is not a resource hog. Although it’s freeware, I encourage folks to throw a few bucks to Piriform; it’s well worth it.

System Mechanic is a full suite of optimization tools, from defragmenting hard drives to cleaning out Registry junk to optimizing various performance factors and more. I have an old version, which can be a bit of a resource hog but my geek friends tell me that more recent versions of System Mechanic are less greedy for resources.

Have your own favorites? Share ‘em here!

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