Technical Writer

Days two and three expanded and carried on with the themes of day one.

Translation and localisation came up again with one of the early day two sessions being a practical example of how a specific company dealt with it. As I said yesterday, this is big news now, and has been growing in importance over the last few years. It seemed that everyone I spoke to—at morning tea, at lunch, sitting beside me at the conference—was doing it.

Structured authoring came up again and again too. Often as a fait accompli—we’re doing this in a structured way—rather than ‘how tos’ on structured authoring, although one presenter did touch on how much the medium we are presenting in impacts how and what we write. This was really driven home to me by questions from the audience—where you could see that no matter how hard we tried to get our head around it, we still thought in terms of how our documentation is to be produced. Separating content from output is the big mind leap we have to do to really make structured authoring work.

A couple of sessions looked backwards to see some good ideas from the past. The Hughes Corporation STOP method could have been designed by an agile writer of today, and on-line help seems to be circular (or maybe like a pendulum) in that old ideas come around again.

There were some good practical sessions on these two days. How other people did things, the tools they used, the issues they had had.

One thing I really like about this conference is that the people presenting all still work in the field, experiencing the same problems and issues that the rest of us are. I have been to other conferences (non-tech writer ones) where the people who presented were mostly academic, and totally out of touch with how things really work. Needless to say, I’ll only go to a conference like that once. This one I go back to year after year, which I think says the organisers are getting something right.

Next year’s conference is in Darwin. Maybe I’ll see you there.

Last Modified : May 28th, 2009
Filed under : Tech Writer
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