Hello again!!

Like promised in my last post, here I am blogging again about, how to start of your career as a Technical Writer.

Technical Writing Resources

- By Gurpreet Singh (http://TechnicalWritingToolBox.com)

Download Technical Writing Resources in a PDF

You can download the Technical Writing Resources provided on this page as a pdf (designed for print) from http://technicalwritingtoolbox.com/technical-writing-resources.

A Day in the Life of a Technical Writer

* http://bit.ly/LJyKhg (link from the blog- I’d rather be writing)
* http://bit.ly/JqrFoH (link from the blog- Technical Writing Toolbox)

Recommended Blogs on Technical Writing

What is the difference between the Oxford, Harvard, and the Serial comma?

The Oxford comma (also known as Harvard comma or Serial comma) is the comma inserted just before the coordinating conjunction (usually ‘and’ or ‘or’, and sometimes ‘nor’) in the last item of a list of three or more items. For example: Gurpreet's blog is dedicated to Jack, Jill, Red Riding Hood, Captain Kirk, and Spock.

When to use the Oxford Comma?

I use a serial comma ONLY when it satisfies all the following three conditions:

Twitter is a fantastic media for sharing information. Several technical writers (including me; my twitter id is @gurpreetwrites) have started using this media to share news, tutorials, and sometimes their opinion about technical writing.

Twitter provides a way to categorize tweets by using a tag/term prefixed by # symbol, known as hashtags. The syntax of using a hashtag is # where could be the category name such as RoboHelp or Framemaker.

Twitter help provides several guidelines for using #tags:

Working with subject matter experts (SMEs) is an on-going challenge for any technical writer. SMEs could be a business analyst, program manager, developer or designer. Usually SMEs give a first-hand experience of the product or application. So you love it or hate it; SME is an inevitable point of contact for information gathering.

Technical writers will be on their toes during most of the product release period. Delay in receiving the reviews, getting last-minute input for update just before the product release- all these adds up the stress among technical writers. Not only do they have to add extra work hours to meet up the deadline, but the hastiness to update the documents also aggravates the number of errors in the documents. However, with some well-planned strategy, this problem can be easily tackled.

Stress for Timely Reviews

We have discussed this subject many times in this forum. But still I can't help writing this.

A job email I received says that potential candidates must send samples, ideally a help file like document, as part of the filtering process. I feel this is mainly because of lack of faith in the skills of potential candidates, or a flawed market study about the skills of technical writers in Bangalore as well as India in particular.

Hello All,

I like to thank those of you who participated in the STC-India's salary survey for the year 2011.

The compiled results of the same can be accessed from STC Salary Survey 2011.

I hope this will help you get a better perspective of where you stand, with regards to your colleagues, in the Technical Documentation world.

Regards,
MahS

I am sure this question plays in a lot of people’s minds and most of us may have wondered what translators really do and why do they need that “unreasonable amount of time” if help is available in form of tools like Google Translate especially when you want a document as of yesterday :)

Hello all,

Please take part in the Society for Technical Communicators
(STC) - India, salary survey for 2011-2012. The more the merrier. Well it will help us get a better picture of where we stand with respect to our peers. It is open till November 4, 2011. It has only 4 questions in it and will hardly take a minute to complete.

STC salary survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/STCIndia2011SalSurvey

Regards,
MahS