All Episodes
Displaying 31 - 55 of 55 in total
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: ...