1. My day job keeps me too busy. This is my own personal demon that’s kept me from striking out as a freelancer. It’s the 100-pound gorilla on my back, the elephant in the room (pick your metaphor). So when the chance to go freelance finally presented itself last month, I took it. Jumped into the deep end with both feet and I’ve been loving every minute of it. Even though I’ve made a grand total of $5 so far, I haven’t had this much fun in years!
2. I’m not inspired to write. This is another tough one to battle, as we’ve all run into it. Whether it’s because you’re too tired from your day job, you’re sick, your kids or family take up too much of your time, sometimes inspiration is nowhere to be found. But this is when you’ve got to persevere and just do it. I’ve been trying to stick to a writing schedule, making sure I write something everyday.
3. I don’t have a niche topic to write about. This is an easy one to fix, even though you might think you are truly stuck for topics. Sit down with a blank pad of paper and a pen (or a blank text file on your computer, whichever works for you.) Think of three things you like to do. You could write “cook”, “eat”, and “play video games”. Good, now think of 5 more. Pull out your thesaurus and start looking up some of these words and see what other topics you can develop. Pretty soon your page will be full of ideas and topics for niches you can write about. Do a bit of research on the Web and see what sites or publications are out there for those topics. There you have it, you’ve discovered your niche topic, the things you like to write about. Chances are these are topics you’re passionate about, and have some knowledge about, so you can just start writing. So go ahead, start writing.
4. Web content writing is different than corporate writing, so I won’t be able to find work as a web writer. Another one that’s specific to me. I’ve worked as a technical writer for over 8 years in a corporate environment, so writing web content is definitely something I’ve not done “professionally”. BUT, I do consider myself a writer first, and a computer geek second, so between those two things I know I can figure it out. I do some research on web content writing, and I read blogs and articles…A LOT of blogs and articles. And I started writing posts on my own blogs (like this one), practicing the craft. While I know I’m not perfect, I think I’m getting the handle of it, and I know that as a good writer, I trust myself to be able to write whatever web content is needed, for either myself or a potential client. Plus I can use these posts as “clips” for job applications.

• email overload
• information spelunking
• organic information sharing

Email Overload

The first issue, email overload, is a big one these days. Instead of simply phoning a colleague to ask a question, we send an email. This gets doubled if you’re dealing with colleagues in a different office in a different country. Then if you’ve got to copy your boss because of a change in a deadline, or some other issue that requires management notification, add another set of emails. And on it grows.

If you have a wiki, you can have a whole discussion on a topic right on the wiki page. Everyone sees everyone’s comments, so nothing’s duplicated, and in fact, even more of a discussion might occur because of something you might not have thought of. Depending on the wiki software you use, you might even be able to subscribe by RSS to the pages that you’re interested in, so you’re only notified when there’s an update to that topic. Very handy.

Information Spelunking

You know what this is, you’re looking for the answer to a question you have, and you’re not entirely sure where it’s stored on your department or company’s intranet. So you start searching, or spelunking rather, since typically there’s no structure to the sites you’re looking through. You end up spelunking through topics, pages, and sites with no success.

A well-structured wiki would help you focus your search and allow your users to find the information they need quickly. Determining the structure can be a time-consuming task at the outset, but it’s well-worth it for your colleagues in the end. It’ll save them time when they need to find information, and it’ll save everyone who’s got to share information time too, since they’ll know exactly where to put it.

Organic Information Sharing

Normally I don’t like to use terms like “organic” when talking about technical writing, but it’s just so apt here that I have to. What makes a wiki organic in terms of sharing is simply that everyone can contribute to a wiki. According to Wikipedia, a wiki is “a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.” As long as the structure is well-laid out at the beginning, and there are some style guide-type rules on how the information should be presented, then you’re all set to be organic.

A word of caution on the style guide-type rules though. Non-writers aren’t used to dealing with these types of restrictions, and they’re often not even used to sharing much information, so if you put too many restrictions on them, they’re not going to want to share at all. So the rules should be basic, like check for spelling & grammar, use some headings, that kind of thing. However it’s always a good idea to have a technical writer review the pages on a regular basis to catch things like this.

In the end,

wikis are a great way to promote information sharing, and to get everyone involved and invested in their work. In my opinion, technical writers are going to be called upon to manage these types of installations more and more, given the proliferation of online workers. It just makes things easier to transmit and share the information on a wiki. So as a technical writer, we’ve got to learn how to use these tools and master them, so that we’re ready for the next phase in our careers. While my own experience with wikis has been limited, I can see how they can become extremely useful tools to software development teams, and I look forward to working with them and seeing where they can take me.

Have any of you had good experiences with wikis in your work lives? Which wiki software do you like?

This one’s a particularly interesting one, since it’s forcing me to exercise all of my TW muscles.

• Restructuring: The document suffered from being unfocused, as it meandered from topic to topic.
• Rewriting: It was originally written by someone whose command of the English language isn’t that great, so the language had to be redone to be understood.
• Re-Styling: I had to reapply a new version of our department’s document template to it. This was the “simple” part of the project.

The Restructuring portion of the show is taking the longest time, although it’s complicated by the Rewriting task. Sometimes the language problems are getting in the way of the Restructuring since I’m having trouble figuring out what the developer was trying to say. A quick 30-minute session with another developer helped solve a lot of the clarity issues, so that I could concentrate on restructuring the information better.

All in all I spent about 4 days working on this document before delivering it back to the managing author. She’s actually going to add more content to it, however needed to have it “massaged” before she could really see what was going on. I look forward to finishing off this Developer Guide as it’ll go a long way to helping out the developers work with this new aspect of our system.