Life as a wannabe freelance writer
In: TW| Working| Writing| technical writing
28 Mar 2010Last night I was visiting a friend who’s husband also works for my employer. After dinner I noticed that he was getting ready to go out and he said it’s because he had to supervise the release of a new version of software that the company was doing. I asked him about it and was [...]
In: TW| Writing| technical writing
16 Mar 2009“But the deadline’s coming up fast, we’ve just got to start cranking out the content, pronto!”
A former technical writing manager told me this a while back when our documentation team was struggling to produce consistent content for the new software release. And it would have been an acceptable reponse and exhortation to us, if we [...]
In: TW| Working| Writing| technical writing
20 Feb 2009Today I was reading a post from Ugur Akinci about how wikis will transform the role of the technical writer, and it reminded me about the wiki initiatives I was trying to promote at a previous job. Wikis are great tools if they’re used correctly, as they can help alleviate a number of issues that [...]
In: Writing| technical writing
21 Jan 2009In my almost 8 years of technical writing I have not been that involved in creating and maintaining user interface (UI) strings. I’ve only ever been asked to review and edit UI strings, but never asked to create them from scratch. I’ve created online Help, I’ve created context-sensitive online Help, administration & installation guides, user [...]
In: TW| technical writing
18 Jan 2009Gordon over at OneManWrites talked about the “black art” of estimation, and so I’d add in my two cents as well.
Estimating is definitely an art, there’s no doubt about it. Each project is different because there are so many variables that come in to play. It’s difficult to try and distill them down to a [...]
I'm a freelance technical writer who's trying to make the transition from working for somebody else to working for me.