Good communication has always been about understanding your audience — shaping your message to match how they think, what they need, and what they’ll do with it. Information typing, the “IT” in the technical documentation standard DITA, codifies that practice into a design discipline that organizes content around its function rather than its form. Rob […]
technical documentation
Manny Silva: Docs as Tests for Resilient Technical Documentation – Episode 213
Technical documentation of software products is critical work that needs to accurately inform end users, regardless of how quickly and substantially the software might be changing. Manny Silva has created the Docs as Tests, a system that integrates a set of well-developed practices and a collection of engineering tooling, to help technical communicators streamline and […]
Michael Priestley: Creator of the DITA Structured-Content Standard – Episode 192
Twenty-four years ago at IBM, the company’s commitment to user-focused content led to the decision to develop a standard way of structuring content so that it could be used in multiple channels. Michael Priestley was uniquely positioned to guide the team that created the technical approach to the corporate standard that would ultimately become DITA, […]
Sarah O’Keefe: The Evolution of Technical Content Strategy – Episode 138
Technical content strategy has evolved dramatically over the past 25 years, and Sarah O’Keefe has had a bird’s-eye view of the whole process. As the CEO of Scriptorium, a leading content-operations consultancy, Sarah has both witnessed and participated in the massive changes that have unfolded in the world of technical documentation. We talked about: the […]
Tom Johnson: Documenting APIs – Episode 88
Documenting APIs is one of the newer jobs in the technical writing domain. Tom Johnson enjoys the unique challenges of collaborating with and writing for the developers who create and use these Application Programming Interfaces. He also enjoys reflecting on his work and sharing his insights with his fellow technical communicators. We talked about: his […]
Carlos Evia: Structured Content Authoring – Episode 75
Carlos Evia teaches structured content authoring using DITA and similar tools at Virginia Tech. Structured authoring offers a number of benefits, most notably easy content re-use. By carefully structuring content as it goes into a repository, it can be used later in a variety of publications and applications. Structured authoring has its roots in the […]
Hannah Kirk: Connecting Technical Writing and Content Strategy – Episode 70
Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other. She’s not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking about how content is […]