Thursday, 6 February 2003
The Seven Deadly Assumptions of Technical Communication - William Rice
Years ago, as a young programmer/analyst on a project leader’s course, I made an assumption during a team exercise. Not a crucial mistake, you would think. I assumed that I had all the information I needed to complete the exercise. I also assumed that the exercise was about interviewing a potential employee. In fact, the exercise was actually about the danger of not identifying and confirming assumptions before blindly rushing on with the task at hand.
In this article, I identify seven areas in the field of technical communication where unconfirmed assumptions can lead to a waste of time and money and also undermine your credibility. Read more
Useful links for technical communicators
http://www.prc.dk/user-friendly-manuals/ufm/linklist.htm has some great links/resources. This resource is Edited by Peter Ring, PRC - Peter Ring Consultants, Denmark.
Dictionary of Plain Language
Found this on techcommunicators.com. To check out the dictionary go straight to: http://www.techcommunicators.com/diction.html Hope you find it useful.
Saturday, 1 February 2003
Online Help: Choosing a Tool
There was discussion on the TWIN mailing list about online help and Alfred had this to say about that:
Hi
Another issue with .chm is that you (the end user) have to download the entire file when you're accessing the help system. That might not be such a good idea if your users are accessing the app over a network. Usually for web-based applications people tend to use a HTML-based help system (like WebWorks Help 3.0) or just plain HTML with searching and indexing capabilities.
I would advise you to think about these issues (and others) before picking a tool or a format. RoboHelp might be used by everyone in India (just as an example) but it might not be the best tool for you. Maybe AuthorIT does what you want. Evaluate the tool, its limitations and whether it does what you want it to do. I guess what I am trying to say is that you should make an informed decision.
Alfred
