Category: Working with Others

Phrases That Tick People Off

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:

• I’m done with you.
• I don’t care.
• I couldn’t care less.
• If you say so.
• I’m just a clerk.
• Bite me.
• Whatever.
• What’s your problem?
• It’s not my job.
• Shut up.

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:

• I guess that’s okay.
• It’s easy.
• No one tells me anything.
• Settle down.
• I’ll let you take care of this.

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

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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Marketing and Tech Writers

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

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

• don’t deliver on the promises made during sales pitches
• are not intuitive to use
• don’t have even the the most basic of documentation

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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Why Tech Writers Feel Like Bartleby The Scrivener

Sometimes, being a technical writer is enough to make you run screaming for the comparable simplicity of a sales clerk job at Barnes & Noble. Or to a cabin deep in the woods of Western Massachusetts.

Mars Girl, a tech writer in Ohio, wrote about her frustrations with her contract job—which has not, to date, yielded the professional growth and fulfillment she’d hoped for.

I laughed a lot while reading her saga—laughed out of amusement, empathy, and commiseration. In her paragraphs, most any working tech writer will find something they relate to. The stories we all could tell would keep Scott Adams in Dilbert storylines for decades.

Too many folks, not just tech writers, work for companies that seem caught in an endless loop of misdirection and no direction. They have processes and flowcharts that, while detailed, don’t always reflect what’s actually having to be done on a day-to-day basis—many times at management’s own instruction. This Shtikl comic, I think, perfectly illustrates these environments. The sad thing is that the folks who can least afford to be lost are the same ones who are lost—and clueless about the fact that they are. 

Similarly, there’s the environments where there actually is a direction—it just seems to take unnecessarily long to get from Point A to Point B. I call it management by cowpath. If you ever read the old “Family Circus” cartoons, you can probably remember the circuituous paths home that Billy would take from school or Jeffy would take from a friend’s house. A Brevity comic strip used a tumbleweed and a flock of sheep for its metaphor; coming to the top of a hill, the sheep leading a flock of hundreds says, while looking at what was in front of them for presumably miles, “Oh brother, we’ve been following a tumbleweed this whole time.” You know you’re headed somewhere. Eventually.

We’ve all either been there—or are there. The best you can do is give it a good college try while simultaneously planning your exit strategy. And, in the meantime, when the exasperation runneth over, perhaps another Shtikl comic’s blunt sarcasm will help remind you that you do have comrades-in-arms. And that you’re not the one who’s crazy.

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