Writing Assistance Newsrooom

by Whitney Potsus

Quick! Answer the following questions without putting a lot of thought into them. We want your instinctive, knee-jerk first response.

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by Steve Capri

So you’ve given it a lot of painstaking thought. It’s decided. It’s time. Time to move into management. After all, you’ve worked hard to get where you are. You’ve paid your dues working through the various levels of technical-writing jobs, and survived all the promotional requirements to get through each position, and so on. As a senior-level professional, you’re at a crossroads. How do you prepare and are you absolutely sure you want to make this transition?

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by Robert King

When you first ventured into the tech writing ranks, marketing the department was likely the furthest thing from your mind. You already had work to do, so marketing was somebody else’s job.

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by Christy Simard

At first glance, technical communication (techcom) and technical marketing communication (marcom) appear to be very different genres. Where traditional techcom strives to help people use products, marcom seeks to make people realize they need products. Techcom instructs, while marcom persuades, and this distinction affects everything from the genre’s focus, to its content, and medium.

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by Ruth Nickolich

What does it take to start your own technical-writing business? Chutzpa! Insanity! I began mine by getting a loan from my local bank for my first computer to set up a home office. It was a Micron desktop 386, the fastest computer in town! That was nine years ago. I now have a nice office, a sizeable staff, and all the work I can handle, most of the time.

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By Kerri Harris

Effective communication is a manager’s greatest tool in rallying groups toward a common cause. From the annual department address to daily email, careful audience consideration is vital in determining how accurately audiences receive messages. Even the most engaging statements lose meaning when barriers to effective communication foster misconception and confusion.

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by Kerri Harris

Today’s business climate of outsourcing, in-sourcing, virtual teams, and ROI-driven objectives can leave a manager at any level feeling powerless. Yet, we often see examples of those who can elicit unwavering support from their teams, driving highly effective projects, and getting the best performance from employees despite ever-increasing workloads. What is it about these individuals that makes them stand out as great leaders? Generally, the answer is the difference between a strict management model and one that includes basic principals of leadership. There are recognizable characteristics in great leaders and simple strategies anyone can adopt to improve employee performance and change the work environment for the better.

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by Aparna Datta

With our economy still on the down slope, it is difficult for technical managers to justify keeping an excessive amount of technical writers on their staffs, let alone hiring new ones. In many cases, managers feel they don’t even need writers, arguing that everyone has writing ability. Of course, today’s technical writers not only write, they also perform many other tasks: programming, web development, training, and so on. Add to that the fact that many are also highly trained and certified in other areas besides writing.

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by Karen O’Keefe

The technical communications profession involves a unique mix of technical and communication skills, which is not easy to find. Most managers have had the experience of interviewing and subsequently hiring a candidate who later turns out not to be the right person for the job. This situation begs the question of how to identify which candidate is a good fit for a given position. The answer is that there are five key activities that make the difference between a successful hiring decision and a not-so-successful one. We have all been on both sides of the interview, and this article will attempt to make you, the interviewer, more successful.

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by Margie Yundt and Sherry McMenemy

It’s in the numbers. Creating documentation is not an exact science, yet as communication leaders, we are expected to provide real estimates for how much time we need to document a project, or what we can produce given a predetermined timeline.

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