Tech writing what what?

June 26th, 2009

Hey guys hey guys! Little known fact: I went to school for technical communication. You know, like writing manuals and web content and all that biznass. True story. Did it for a while in conjunction with dev.

At any rate, I got to dust off my not so rusty (after all, I communicate about technical stuff every day) skills to write some web copy for a startup the other day. SO. So. I thought maybe. Maybe I could write about it here for whatever audience that stumbles upon this entirely unfocused collection of ill constructed paragraphs.

STEPS TO CLARITY (aka what I think about before putting fingers to keyboard in writing startup copy)

  1. Figure out what you do. Whether it’s easy, like Drupal dev for nonprofits, or more obscure, like myriad js based services development, sit down and come up with a one-sentence definition. CAREFUL: showing this definition to non-technical users will probably cause glazed-over looks and slight drooling.
  2. What are you good for? Really. What the heck are you good for. In totally simple terms. Give some examples, list it all out. While you’re at it, list what you aren’t good for. Finding the space where you operate off the bat saves you and your customers the pain of figuring it out as you go.
  3. Who is your audience? What level of experience are they coming at you with? Are you pitching to major corporations, in which you’ll have several levels of bureaucracy and knowledge? What kind of buzzwords are they stuck on? Here’s where you need to research the trends of your target consumer.
  4. Pull it all together. Rewrite your first line, the definition of services, in terms of what you are offering, and who you’re offering it to. This is where you develop some diagrams, lists, whatever to make your purpose easy to access. Try to boil it down initially to one or two sentences, but if that sacrifices clarity for the sake of conciseness, don’t do it. If you end up with a full paragraph, break out the bullets. The idea is to put on a different pair of glasses when approaching your content. The glasses of your typical consumer.

If you can’t do this, you might want to hire a middle person like a technical communicator lest interaction with customers become difficult. Also, it can be very tough to be as close to your product as a developer or engineer is without losing objectivity that enables you to communicate non-technically.

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Google Wave

May 30th, 2009

Wheee!! I’m uber excited about this. Checking out developer api biznass and what what :)

OH! you can see more here: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

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