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Journals by EmailHere are a few cartoons to help you wind down after a week working in the tech comm trenches. (I drew these for the newsletter of the NY Metro Chapter of STC some months ago.)
Archive for 'Off-Topic'
Of course, since the year has turned, it’s time for some new year’s resolutions. Here are ten resolutions for technical writers:
- Finally learn what DITA stands for.
- Delete that “For more information, go to our website” line from the Internet access setup instructions.
- Tell the project manager: “It’s all right if no one reviews the project plan for you. No one reads the plan anyway.”
- Read the Society for Technical Communication’s bylaws.
- Find a professional conference that costs less than the bill for your car’s transmission replacement.
- Secretly sew a small, wireless microphone in the lining of the project manager’s tie so you can hear about project schedule changes live.
- Start writing a book on a tech comm topic that will still be relevant when you finish it.
- Convince your teammate that your favorite help authoring tool really is the best thing since sliced bread.
- Keep your heart rate normal when someone uses “media” as a singular noun.
- Decide what your job title is for real.
In a university class I took called “Reading Theory for Writers,” the professor had us write a page about whether we thought we had an inner voice. Not the kind that argues with you about which shoes to wear, but the one that speaks in your mind while you’re reading.
I argued that I do have an inner voice. My main evidence is that when I’m reading and I come across a word I’m not sure how to pronounce, I notice that’s the case. Why would I need to know how to pronounce a word if there isn’t some kind of voice in my head?
A similar concept, that our thoughts have a voice, has been used in TV and movies when you have some device that makes people’s thoughts audible to those around them. These disembodied voices come out of thin air, and of course, people are thinking offensive things about each other, resulting in conflict.
I remember reading something like this in one of David Eddings’ novels, where one character made another’s vocal so he could hear them. It took the second character a few minutes to realize his thoughts were actually audible. (The first character was doing this partly to provoke the second.)
I realized recently, however, that this is impossible (something impossible portrayed in the media?). The only thing that gives voice to our thoughts is our vocal cords. If our thoughts were to pass out of our minds some other way, we would need a similar mechanism. Even if our thoughts could be picked out of our heads by some external agent, it would need such a mechanism, and chances are, the resulting voice wouldn’t sound like its owner. We wouldn’t be able to identify people’s thoughts by the voice.
Anyway, that’s just something that was on my mind that I thought I’d share.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an animator. I loved drawing Looney Tunes characters. I did it so much that I can still draw them, years later, though having done it seldom in the interim.
Of course, I changed my mind and decided to be a writer. I would still draw and doodle, and I even had a cartoon strip in the university newspaper later, but I tended to write a lot more than draw.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to get back to drawing on a regular basis. The best way to fit that into my schedule and make sure I actually did it was to spend a few minutes each night sketching and drawing before I go to bed.
I have received compliments on and some small awards for drawings before, so I suppose I’d say I have talent in the area. People have said, “I wish I could draw like that.” For years, I’ve been convinced that most people could “draw like that” if they really wanted to.
Okay, maybe they wouldn’t draw exactly like me, but they could draw well. My opinion is that many people can develop artistic talent if they tried it and kept at it.
Lately, through some of the assignments I’ve had at work, I’ve become acutely aware of intellectual property issues. Many of us are tempted, when we need an image or bit of text, to jump online, run our favorite search engine, and grab the first thing that suits our purpose. After all, since text, images, audio, and video are freely available on the Web, doesn’t that mean they can be freely used?
I admit that I’m among those who would love to get free stuff from the Web all the time and be able to use it in any way I like. To create the gryphon image on my site, I used a couple of photographs from sites that provided license to use and modify the images. It’s great to have things that wide open. There are those selfless souls who place their intellectual property out on the Web and allow everyone to reuse and repurpose it without limits—but I would guess that there are more people like me who like to take advantage of them and at the same time don’t want to invest our own time and resources to offer what we do for nothing.
Many of us are possessive of our content. Businesses pay people to create content, so it only makes sense to want to charge for it. Or I went to all the trouble to write it or draw it with my own time and money, and people should be willing to reward me. Or at least acknowledge me.
I work on three projects and belong to a fourth project that will require some updates to existing documentation before the end of the year. I decided early in 2009 while putting together this year’s goals that I needed to be more productive by spending larger chunks of time on these projects. I tended to bounce from one task to another across projects, flying by the seat of my pants, and I suspected that it was reducing my productivity.
Sometimes that kind of bouncing is unavoidable, such as when my team manager needs me to take care of a communication task or some release notes need some last-minute updating. I gave myself some leeway in the goal. But the overall goal is to spend three- to four-hour chunks of time on a particular project so that even if I switch tasks within a project’s work, at least I’m not having to change my mindset. Because we set goals for each quarter of the year, I’m currently in the quarter where this goal applies.
It’s tough to do. I still find myself bouncing between projects more than I want to or intend to. I think working on this goal has helped my productivity some, but I’m coming to realize that what I’m lacking is planning. I need to plan out those half-day chunks of time so that when I know I have one or two tasks to do, I don’t finish them up and then ask myself, “What else can I do on this project?” Doing that, I probably lose whatever productivity I have gained by continuing to work on the same project.
What I probably need to do is spend a few minutes at the end of each day looking at what I need to do the next day, and then plan out those half-day chunks of time. I think I’ve heard of people who spend a few minutes either at the end of the day or at the beginning planning out what they’re going to do. Those few minutes will probably help the productivity go up. I think I’d rather do it at the end of the day while I still remember where I was and when I’m not distracted by the email that’s accumulated.
Thanks for the idea. I’m glad we talked this over.
My first step into Web design was really very primitive and laughable. I was in the Honors version of 2010 English at Utah State University. The 1010 class was your basic writing composition class, and 2010 was the next step up. Both were required as general classes, but I had obtained the equivalent credits in high school. But for the Honors program, I had to take the 2010 English class.
The instructor added a Web dimension to the regular writing assignments by having us design webpages for our essays and other pieces. This was back in the day when the default background color in Web browsers was medium gray. The first page I did had a medium gray background and was done I believe in FrontPage (does that exist anymore?). It was pretty sad by today’s standards. The others I did for that class weren’t much nicer.
One of the things I would really like to see tech comm tools do is gracefully handle text boxes across formats. If you ever anticipate having to move content from a HAT to some other format, there’s little incentive to do anything other than a dull, single flow of content. No sidebars using divs because they don’t move well into other file types. I understand that in Flare, divs move well into a PDF, but not into Word.
I would like to see divs in HATs convert into text boxes in Word and into text frames in InDesign (or FrameMaker if that’s your bag). I realize this is mixing vendors and file formats something crazy. But that’s why I’m calling this my “Christmas wish.” I don’t expect it to happen. It would just be really slick if these aspects of various document creation tools moved text boxes nicely when exporting or importing.
Technical communicators on the Web have been discussing how tech comm is changing and how we may be an endangered species, perhaps most recently on the LugIron Software blog. Recent issues of STC’s Intercom magazine have addressed this concern and offered advice about how to survive, almost as if they’re talking about how to make it through an impending natural disaster.
This kind of talk is a bit disconcerting for someone like me who has been in the field for only several years. I came out of the professional and technical writing program at Utah State University with certain concepts of what tech comm is. I credit my degree most directly with the fact that I got my job, and my responsibilities were pretty much what I expected they would be. I was later asked what had surprised me the most upon getting into the field after college, and I had a hard time thinking of something.
Now, after only a few years, technical communicators are being told to change or risk becoming obsolete and unemployed.
I remember becoming aware of blogs when I was in college; before that time, I hadn’t really spent any time online at all. In my initial judgment, I saw blogs as ongoing egotistical opinion articles—basically newspapers with only an editorial section. I didn’t have much motivation to be involved with them at any level.
Having been a blogger for nearly a year and a half has changed my opinion. Of course I have realized that blogs aren’t just people’s opinions on what’s going on in the news.
I admit that there’s a self-serving aspect to blogging. If you blog, you should write for yourself to a large degree. I usually write about whatever aspect of tech comm or writing crosses my mind, and I just have that urge to write about it. It’s a bit strange that I want to write in my spare time about what I think about at work, but there you have it. (If I want to write in this space but not about writing itself, I write a Tale.)
