After my nasty lesson with Google Accelerator you think I would have given up on my obsession with speeding up my Internet connection. Unfortunately, there’s nothing like the tantalizing lure of speed and power to blind even the most cautious of web surfers, especially if your Internet connection is agonizingly sluggish. It’s not surprising then, […]

A while ago Tom Johnson asked this question in one of his posts: “Is technical writing boring?”. He got such a plethora of responses on both sides of the issue that he and Heidi decided to explore the issue in a recent Tech Writer Voices podcast by the same name. It was so interesting I […]

As promised in my last post, here is a little segment I’m going to call…(insert drum-roll here)…THE WRITER’S CHALLENGE! Will you muster your courage and face the cunning challenge I’ve set before you? Here it is: I am holding an object in my hand. Guess what the object is by reading it’s patent description. Let […]

There is nothing more sickening than a piece of writing bloated and weighed down by heavy jargon and confusing language. Call it what you will – jargoneze, legalize, bureaucrateze, or just plain gobbledygook. If you’re spreading this kind of rot, you’re a language killer and should be tried and condemned by your peers as such.

Here is a valuable resource that no technical writer, or technical-writing student, can do without: The EServer TC Library, a free library of articles on all manner of relevant subjects: I’ll also put this up on my resources page. A lot of these articles are derived from STC conferences and are available in PDF format.