Buzzwords are just like bad pop stars: they appear mysteriously, gain fans like the plague spreads, and seemingly vanish; yet new ones are constantly appearing. Why do we continuously go through this cycle?
STS has banned buzzwords. I learned quickly that even saying “buzzword” meant trouble—someone would be on a rant soon. So I made a list of the most-abused words with suggested alternatives. I hope I haven’t just created the new lingo.
I did not like change.
Last Monday I began a major new chapter: my internship at Shoap Technical Services. I was hired to do marketing for the summer and given a great deal of freedom. I was encouraged to let my mind run free and to tackle any project I thought I would enjoy doing to increase sales. It’s an aspiring PR girl’s dream. But like I said, I didn’t like change.
I recently completed a project to create a document defining the types of functionality and relationships associated with the various database columns and tables in the back-end of a client’s medical billing software. While the project was fun (at least in the sense that I got to work on something nerdy and technical), it was also a sobering reminder about the uncertainty endemic to the world of consulting.
Recently, I’ve been attending lots and lots of meetings. I like talking to people, learning, brainstorming, smiling, etc. One thing that has been pretty consistent though is that people are not doing their “homework”. Teachers didn’t talk about the importance of homework in our 17+ years of schooling for nothing.
As technical writers, we at Shoap Technical Services feel strongly about words. We feel they hold more power when chosen carefully and used with purpose. We pride ourselves on only writing as much as needed to accurately convey a message, without allowing room for waste.
That’s why we reserve a very special type of hatred for one of those semi-universal annoyances of modern business culture: the e-mail footer disclaimer. It should come as no surprise, then, that we took great pleasure in reading this Economist article explaining exactly how pointless these are. It all boils down to the fact that most of these disclaimers are unenforceable since they seek to impose contractual obligations in a unilateral way.
So please, please, save your bandwidth and mine. Kill the disclaimers.
In technical writing (as well as other areas of life), having a smartphone on me has saved my butt on more than one occasion, and not just for looking up directions to a client site or doing some quick on-the-spot research on some byzantine technical topic that I need to understand.
Whenever I can squeeze an hour out of the month, I like to attend the TAG (Technology Association of Georgia) presentations of what they call technology “Rock Stars.” This past week, Val Rahmani from Damballa spoke about her experience moving from almost 30 years at a large corporation to running an internet security start-up.
At Shoap Technical Services, we take pride in our ability to offer our clients fixed-priced bids for technical documentation and training. We feel that this is an advantage to our clients because everyone likes to know how much a project is going to cost before they start. And we feel confidant that we can correctly estimate a project because 1) we’ve done so many technical writing and training projects over the past 25 years and 2) we’ve learned how to break down a project into small enough parts so we can assign numbers (time) to each part to determine a total cost. What we like to say is, “If we can put our arms around the project, we can successfully bid it.” While we have, at times, missed our estimates and had to finish a project at a loss, most of the time we’re pretty accurate. That makes our clients happy because they know from the outset what they’re going to have to pay and it allows us to make enough money to stay in business.
Aberdeen Group completed a study earlier this year that indicates when technical communications are approached strategically, companies provide significant customer-facing value. – David Houlihan, Senior Research with Aberdeen’s Product Innovation and Engineering Practice.
Christmas, 2009:
The penguin wrapping paper is shredded from an oblong, rectangular package, carefully branded by a stark white apple on black monochrome — The Apple iPod ® Nano. The product is reverently lifted from the case along with the ear buds and sleek quick start guide, leaving the thick, intimidating, and unhelpful paper manual in the bottom — it might as well have been packing peanuts. Why do manufacturers bother with the archaic manual documentation which wastes paper, takes up unneeded space, and adds weight to the shipping fee? The product is blithely toyed with, prodded, poked, and explored without so much as a cursory glance to the woe begotten manual in the box, the user happily glancing through the quick start guide if they come upon any snags in the process of operating their new system. The manual is never read, collects dust, and slowly sinks into oblivion. Let’s explore why the manual falls to such a fate.
