All Episodes
Displaying 31 - 56 of 56 in total
Skill #25: Nudging Users to Action Through Contextual Help
As technical writers, we help users learn processes or complete particular tasks. And we offer this help in several ways, including documentation, video tutorials, or ...
Skill #24: Finding Your Content DNA
John Espirian—technical copywriter and author of the soon-to-be-released book Content DNA—describes content DNA as the "shape" of your brand and then using the power o...
Skill #23: Transitioning into Tech Writing from Very-Much-Not Tech Writing
Think back to the early years of your career as you considered pursuing a career in technical writing. Unless you happened to pursue a formal education in technical wr...
Skill #22: Using Your Detective Skills as a Technical Writer
As technical writers, we often wear many different hats within an organization: we write documentation that teaches people how to use a product; we test new features t...
Skill #21: Mentoring Prospective Tech Writers
All technical writers can look back on their career and likely think of a specific person or two who helped them advance their career. It could be a former professor w...
Skill #20: Understanding Content Marketing
As technical writers, we excel at turning technical information into documentation that helps users understand complex concepts. We write software documentation that h...
Skill #19: Writing for Nonprofit Organizations
Throughout technical writers’ careers, they may find themselves working in several different industries: they could start their career writing end-user documentation f...
Skill #18: Embracing the Long Game of Technical Writing
Anyone who’s been in technical writing for a few years or has attended a technical writing conference has witnessed how quickly the field has evolved. Technical writer...
Skill #17: Branding Your Work
As a technical writer, you’ve likely not considered branding yourself and your work—and understandably so: your documentation—no matter how masterful and easy to under...
Skill #16: Using Cognitive Science to Make Your Technical Writing More Interesting
As a technical writer, what does it mean to make your writing interesting? It’s a question you perhaps have never pondered—and understandably so: you spend your time e...
Skill #15: Transitioning into Instructional Design
Instructional design, as described by my guest, instructional designer Katie Price, means you create courses to help people—whether it’s students at a university or en...
Skill #14: Contributing to Open Source Projects
An open source project is a software program that’s open for anyone to use or modify as they see it. For example, a developer—anywhere in the world—could create an ope...
Skill #13: Getting Your First Job in Technical Communication
Thaddeus Dieken – Technical Writer at Accuray – shares how you can get your first job in technical communication, including how to effectively search for jobs, market ...
Skill #12: Teaching Technical Writing
The technical writer has a variety of valuable skills – such as making documents enjoyable to read and complex topics easy to understand – however, the skill that I th...
Skill #11: Surviving in the Dev World
We all know that successful technical writers are more than writers: they’re designers; they’re knowledge managers; they’re support. However, for technical writers in ...
Best of 2016
2016 was a lovely year for The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast. We had 10 episodes with 11 guests, covering a variety of topics that truly captured the theme of the pod...
Skill #10: Implementing Single-Source Authoring
Paul Stoecklein knows documentation: As Documentation Manager at MadCap – the industry leader in documentation software – and longtime technical writer, Paul understan...
Skill #9: Creating a Human Connection in Your Documentation
We’ve all read (and perhaps written) a boring document: the robot-like language, the walls of text. And we’re all familiar with the result: a disengaged reader who’s l...
Skill #8: Acquiring the Three Types of Knowledge Tech Writers Need to Succeed
Knowledge – as technical writers, it’s one of our greatest assets.However, amid the information overload technical writers often face, it’s also one of the most diffic...
Skill #7: Preparing for the Future of Tech Comm
As the tech comm industry develops, technical writers must embrace a sobering truth: As Dr. Stan Dicks writes in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, “Technic...
Skill #6: Bridging the Gap Between Documentation and Support
Documentation and Support teams share a common goal: to give customers the information they need to get the greatest value from a product.But despite a shared goal, co...
Skill #5: Getting Involved in a Community
We’ve all experienced the joy of community: colleagues mentor you; friends encourage you; strangers point you towards their favorite pizza shop downtown.For that momen...
Skill #4: Understanding UX Design
Where should user experience (UX) design fit in the technical writer’s toolbox?Well, think about how your users experience your documentation:Are they following a work...
Skill #3: Creating Just-in-Time Documentation
Face it: sometimes, documenting software can be tricky.Not because we don’t understand the software – we get that. Nor because we can’t articulate it in layman’s terms...
Skill #2: Transitioning from Tech Writing to Marketing
What’s the ultimate stereotype of technical writers?Easy: that once you begin your career as a technical writer, you’re caught in a documentation vortex. And worse – t...
Skill #1: Applying Empathy to Your Audience Analysis
Once you’ve found your end-user, think about how you find his or her truest needs for the product or service.For many technical writers, it looks something like this: ...