Category: Skills

Social media trends

Reading The Can’t-Miss Social Media Trends For 2013 reminds me how thoroughly behind I am on planning and implementing my personal use of social media for anything other than enjoyable goofing off. “Personal use” for me includes the groups for which I do volunteer work as well as things like this website. 7 Must Have …

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The value of editors

Paul Ford, in Real Editors Ship, says some things I’ve been trying to tell people for years. Other editors will understand what he’s talking about; many of the people who need us most won’t get it. Here’s a quote: Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are …

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Editing troubleshooting procedures

The Diagnosis-Resolution Structure in Troubleshooting Procedures, by David K. Farkas, on the WritersUA website. In this paper, I define troubleshooting procedures and briefly sketch out how they are developed. Then I analyze the genre’s underlying architectural structure of diagnosis and resolution, showing both simple and complex configurations of symptoms and solution methods. These configurations are …

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Engaging readers in documentation

At the AODC 2010 conference, Sarah Maddox, who works for Atlassian, an agile development environment, spoke on engaging readers in the documentation and the concept of documentation as an emotional experience. Sarah explained the advantages to both the customers and the company of involving readers (users) and discussed some of the techniques that Atlassian has …

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Effective Onscreen Editing, 2nd edition

Geoff Hart’s Effective Onscreen Editing is an essential resource for anyone who edits onscreen, regardless of the word processor in use. Geoff’s examples are from Microsoft Word, but most of his recommendations can be translated readily to OpenOffice.org or other programs. The book is available in both PDF and printed forms, each optimised for its …

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