Category Archive for Technical writing

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, recently wrote about her frustrations with her current contract — a gig that has [...]

The e-mail came to me at work one day, bearing the Subject line “Would you sign a petition to ban this substance?”. It started as a joke, passed around the office to see how many of the adults were fooled by it. It triggered a thought in my own mind about a) how unnecessarily convoluted [...]

In my other life, I work with a guinea pig rescue, handling their PR, various online projects, and public education appearances. As such, I have presentations in long and short versions, for adults and for kids, for solo talks and for crowded adoption open houses. When you do this enough, you convince yourself that you’re [...]

Over the summer, my friend invited me to join her food blog as a guest author so I could write about my explorations as a newly re-minted tea junkie. It seemed easy enough — just click on the link in the e-mail sent by Blogger and 1-2-3, ready to write.
The page I landed on was [...]

In my day job, I’ve been working a lot the last few weeks with requirements documentation and test cases. These have been huge documents for the last year — hundreds of requirements and associated test cases — that were being maintained in Word and Excel until we finally got access to the client’s requirements management [...]

Returning to the Geek Squad profile on “60 Minutes,” there was another comment that stood out to me (emphasis added):
New York school teacher David Barkhymer, who considers himself a bit of geek, fell into the last category: he spent three days trying to hook up his new 32 inch HDTV, plodding through menus and a [...]