About Gordon RSS feed
Who am I?
Currently Technical Information Manager with Sword ciboodle, based in Scotland (yeah, I'm a Documentation Manager), I'm interested in all things technical communications related, particularly focussed on software development. I'm also a BIG advocate of Web 2.0 ideas.
My Posts
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Language Log: Joe, this is for you.
“The bottom line is that you should let your expert writers write, and choose from the full array of presentations that English grammar allows, rather than chasing around trying to eradicate putative errors that actually not errors at all, and never have been.”
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UA Conference Notes - Day 2 - notes from Day 2 of the European User Assistance Conference
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UA Conference Notes - Day 1 - notes from Day 1 of the European User Assistance Conference
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Use Cases for User Assistance Writers :: UXmatters. - Use cases aren’t just useful tools for defining functional requirements. They can be a useful design tool for writers of user assistance.
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ITauthor podcast #14 - August 29th, 2008 - Documentation and Agile Software Development :: ITauthor.
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Driving Development - my take on using documentation to help drive the development project.
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“‘User-Guide-Driven Development’, or UGDD for short. The mechanics of UGDD is similar to that of Test-Driven Development (TDD), but before I write the test for a feature, I write a snippet of the user guide describing the feature I am about to implement. Whereas TDD focuses on the functionality, UGDD focuses on both the functionality and the usability”
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ROI - How much work should you do on something that will only be used by a small number of people?.
Interesting thoughts, we are all under business pressures, how often does ROI figure in your thinking?
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How do YOU conduct an interview?
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My thoughts on a common request
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Conducting Effective Team Technical Reviews | A Technical Communication Community.
Some excellent advice and ideas to make your reviews go smoother.
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Tech Writers, Grammar, and the Prescriptive Attitude | A Technical Communication Community.
Prescriptive grammar is useful for teaching English as a second language, but it has little value for the practicing writer. Clinging to it may provide emotional security, but only at the expense of making writing harder than it needs to be. The culture-wide devotion to it will not be changed in a moment. But conscientious writers can at least change their own habits, and make life easier for themselves.
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Gryphon Mountain Journals » Blog Archive » Enhancements vs. Just Documenting It.
“NO. You can’t just explain it in the manual.”
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one man writes » Consideration Layer Model
A tentative attempt at understanding all the things we, as technical writers, have to consider. A framework for how we work?? Who knows.
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These things I believe. « Not The User’s Fault.
One to pass onto the development guys and gals but there are plenty of reminders of why technical writers should be acting as user advocates at all times.
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