Robert Desprez Communications

Ways to keep your skills sharp

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There’s no short­age of con­fer­ences, train­ing web sites, and webi­na­rs to keep your skills sharp.

As I stat­ed in an ear­li­er blog entry, I believe it’s up to you to keep your­self mar­ketable and cre­ate your own train­ing plan. I like this quote from a recruiter: “You can’t rely on a com­pa­ny for your growth and train­ing anymore…Except for a few enlight­ened com­pa­nies, if they’re train­ing you at all, they’re train­ing you for what they need, not nec­es­sar­i­ly train­ing for what you need to devel­op your tech­ni­cal skills over the long run.”

My pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment plan includ­ing attend­ing a con­fer­ence every two to three years, aug­ment­ed with reg­u­lar self-direct­ed learn­ing. The last few years I’ve attend­ed and pre­sent­ed at two Writ­er­sUA con­fer­ences. Between con­fer­ences, I sign up for tech­ni­cal writ­ing webi­na­rs and read busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy books. I also sub­scribe to Wired. Last year, I signed up for a mem­ber­ship to Lynda.com.

Lynda.com

Lynda.com teach­es com­put­er skills in video for­mat to mem­bers through month­ly and annu­al sub­scrip­tion-based plans. I’ve found it help­ful for learn­ing how to cre­ate EPUBs and brush­ing up on Robo­Help, FrameMak­er, Microsoft Office pro­grams, Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets (CSS), and Search Engine Opti­miza­tion for web sites.  One glar­ing exception—Lynda.com does not offer train­ing for Mad­Cap Flare.

Recorded webinars

I reg­u­lar­ly watch record­ed webinars.

Adobe offers free record­ed videos for tech­ni­cal writers:

http://tinyurl.com/y3j72x

Mad­Cap also offers free webinars:

http://tinyurl.com/lv8vrcq

Scrip­to­ri­um Pub­lish­ing offers time­ly and insight­ful thoughts on tech­ni­cal writ­ing trends:

http://tinyurl.com/kxa67qn

The Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion also offers webi­na­rs for a fee:

http://tinyurl.com/mhvkg8a

Conferences

Here’s a sum­ma­ry of upcom­ing con­fer­ences this year.

Mad­World 2014 World­wide Learn­ing Con­fer­ence, April 13–15, San Diego
http://www.madcapsoftware.com/events/madworld/

Con­tent Man­age­ment Strategies/DITA North Amer­i­ca 2014, April 28–30, Seattle
http://www.cm-strategies.com/2014/index.htm

STC annu­al con­fer­ence, May 18–21, Phoenix
http://summit.stc.org/program-info/program-overview/

Lava­con, Octo­ber 13–15, 2014, Portland
http://lavacon.org/2014/about-portland/

How do you keep your skills current?

Does job security exist anymore?

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Every few months, I have a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one who argues that work­ing as an employ­ee is more secure than a con­trac­tor. I disagree.

The idea that work­ing as an employ­ee offers any job secu­ri­ty is an old par­a­digm. In the 1950s and 1960s, com­pa­nies took care of employ­ees and it was­n’t unusu­al for peo­ple to work for one orga­ni­za­tion for decades. These days, it feels like com­pa­nies fre­quent­ly restruc­ture, declare bank­rupt­cy, and hire and fire employ­ees on a whim. I fig­ure that if you man­age to eke out a job as an employ­ee at one com­pa­ny  for three years in today’s econ­o­my, you’ve done well (espe­cial­ly in high-tech).

I recent­ly worked with a woman who was ter­ri­fied of los­ing her job. She asked me about work­ing as a con­trac­tor. I explained some of the ben­e­fits but also the risks—namely, my job can be ter­mi­nat­ed with almost no notice and with­out sev­er­ance. She could­n’t com­pre­hend why I would choose work­ing as a con­trac­tor. She craved secu­ri­ty in a world that no longer offers any guar­an­tees to any work­er. After my con­tract fin­ished in the fall, the com­pa­ny’s man­age­ment prompt­ly declared they need­ed to cut costs. As an employ­ee, her posi­tion was elim­i­nat­ed and she was jet­ti­soned. So much for job security.

For the record, here are some of the rea­sons I contract:

  • Vari­ety of work: In Cana­da, con­tract work­ers typ­i­cal­ly work on a large project for six months to one year. That means I am exposed to a lot of inter­est­ing projects in a com­pressed peri­od. I’ve doc­u­ment­ed Share­Point imple­men­ta­tions, soft­ware roll-outs, and indus­tri­al equip­ment in one year. I believe that being exposed to dif­fer­ent projects, peo­ple, and tech­nolo­gies has made me a bet­ter writer. As a con­trac­tor, it’s sink or swim.
  • The adren­a­line rush. It’s stress­ful when you know your con­tract is com­ing to a close in four weeks and you have don’t have anoth­er lead. It’s also stress­ful when your client decides that it needs to cut costs and your ser­vices are no longer need­ed. But with that stress comes excite­ment. I’ve worked on con­tract for more than four years and have been work­ing con­sis­tent­ly, except for the occa­sion­al two- to three-week break.
  • High­er income. I don’t receive paid vaca­tion, health and den­tal ben­e­fits, or sev­er­ance pack­ages. Clients rec­og­nize this so are will­ing to pay more for my ser­vices. If you man­age your mon­ey well, you can cre­ate your own sev­er­ance pack­age (essen­tial­ly a finan­cial cush­ion if you are between con­tracts) and put aside mon­ey for your retire­ment. In Cana­da, health and den­tal ben­e­fits are sur­pris­ing­ly afford­able: I pur­chased a pri­vate health plan that cov­ered my fam­i­ly for about $150 per month—hardly cost pro­hib­i­tive. One caveat: I know that health plans in the U.S. are much more expensive.
  • Pre­ferred tax rates. As the own­er of an incor­po­rat­ed busi­ness in Cana­da, I pay the small busi­ness tax rate of 13.5 per­cent on earn­ings. That means if I earn $100,000, I could pay $13,500 in tax. But in real­i­ty, small busi­ness own­ers can also write off their car costs, a por­tion of their mort­gage, books and mag­a­zines, lunch­es and din­ners that are relat­ed to work, health plan costs, and much more. So in real­i­ty, the tax rate I pay is less than 13.5 per­cent. In con­trast, a Cana­di­an employ­ee can pay up to 38 per­cent in tax for the same $100,000.

On a relat­ed note, a report by Intu­it argues that full-time oppor­tu­ni­ties may be hard­er to find in the future as com­pa­nies rely more on “con­tin­gent work­ers.” Here’s an excerpt from the report: “Today, rough­ly 25–30 per­cent of the U.S. work­force is con­tin­gent, and more than 80 per­cent of large cor­po­ra­tions plan to sub­stan­tial­ly increase their use of a flex­i­ble work­force in com­ing years…In the U.S. alone, con­tin­gent work­ers will exceed 40 per­cent of the work­force by 2020.”

Con­tract­ing, though, is not for every­one. You need to net­work with oth­ers, pro­mote your­self, nego­ti­ate with clients, invoice, remit tax­es to the gov­ern­ment, and jug­gle the needs of mul­ti­ple clients. Con­trac­tors fre­quent­ly com­plain of anx­i­ety and fatigue.

Will I ever enter­tain work­ing as an employ­ee again? Yes, of course. But if I do work as an employ­ee again, it won’t be because of the promise of job security.

How to use illustrations to make your
technical docs clearer

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Images can be a suc­cinct and effec­tive way to con­vey a mes­sage. Yet I don’t see many illus­tra­tions being used in tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Many writers—including me—don’t think their strength is illustrating.

Dan Roam, in his book The Back of the Nap­kin, argues that one does­n’t have to be a gift­ed artist or use Adobe Illus­tra­tor or Microsoft Pow­er­Point to cre­ate effec­tive images. Draw­ings can be as sim­ple as hand-drawn pic­tures, he says. Indeed, his book is brim­ming  with draw­ings that resem­ble doo­dles. One of my favorite things about Roam’s book is that he offers a frame­work that helps read­ers think about how to approach illustrating.

Here are some of the draw­ings he discusses:

  • Por­traits: To explain a con­cept that address­es the “who” or “what,” Roam rec­om­mends using a qual­i­ta­tive dia­gram. For exam­ple, many peo­ple strug­gle with under­stand­ing the term “meta­da­ta.” You could try to define it (such as “it’s data about data.”) But that def­i­n­i­tion often leaves peo­ple still scratch­ing their heads. An alter­na­tive solution—you could draw it.

Example of metadata

In short, meta­da­ta pro­vides more details about a doc­u­ment, such as who wrote the file, when the per­son wrote it, the point of the doc­u­ment, and so on.

  •  Charts: If you’re try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate a quan­ti­ty, writ­ing about it may suf­fice. But if you’re per­form­ing a com­par­i­son, a pie chart or bar chart is the best choice. Here’s a fic­ti­tious example:

example_chart

  • Time­lines: To explain a process or work­flow, you could try explain­ing each step. Anoth­er way to accom­plish the same thing is by using a sim­ple work­flow dia­gram, which explains “when” some­thing hap­pens in a process. For work­flows, I fre­quent­ly use Microsoft Office’s Smar­tArt fea­ture. Here’s a sam­ple work­flow I cre­at­ed that con­veys a com­mon­ly used approach to cre­at­ing tech­ni­cal documents:

Authoring_process

  • Maps: When explain­ing the rela­tion­ship of one object to anoth­er, Roam rec­om­mends you use a map. When I think of maps, I tend to think of street maps. But that’s too nar­row a def­i­n­i­tion. Maps can show all sorts of things. From Roam’s book, here’s one exam­ple that explains the rela­tion­ship among objects:

Example of a map

Here’s anoth­er screen cap­ture from Roam’s book that shows an orga­ni­za­tion­al chart, which is just anoth­er type of map:

Organizational chart

  •  Flow­charts:  Flow­charts are tools that explain “how” a process works. If you’re seri­ous about flow­charts, you could use Visio. For end-user doc­u­men­ta­tion, I find Visio dia­grams too tech­ni­cal look­ing and uninvit­ing. I cre­at­ed this sim­ple flow­chart in Pow­er­Point that explains one way to review tech­ni­cal documents:

Example of flowchart

In this blog entry, I’ve just scratched the sur­face of Roam’s book. The Back of the Nap­kin is well worth a read for tech­ni­cal writ­ers who want to diver­si­fy their skill set and use visu­al think­ing to work through com­plex tech­ni­cal concepts.

Are you settling for too little?

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Remem­ber the Greek myth of Icarus?

Mas­ter craft­man Daedalus craft­ed a set of wings made out of wax and feath­ers for his son, Icarus, so that he could escape Crete. Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun or his wings would melt. Icarus didn’t heed his father’s advice and end­ed up soar­ing too high. His wings melt­ed, he plum­met­ed to the ocean, and died.

The cau­tion­ary tale that we learned from the sto­ry: lis­ten to your par­ents, don’t dis­obey your elders, and don’t dis­re­gard the rules.

Writer and busi­ness mar­keter Seth Godin argues in his book The Icarus Decep­tion that there’s anoth­er part of the myth that isn’t wide­ly known. Daedalus also remind­ed his son not to fly too close to the ocean because the water would ruin his wings.

Writes Godin: “It’s far more dan­ger­ous to fly too low than too high, because it feels safe to fly low. We set­tle for low expec­ta­tions and small dreams and guar­an­tee our­selves less than we are capa­ble of. By fly­ing too low, we short­change not only our­selves but also those who depend on us or might ben­e­fit from our work.”

Image of Icarus

He argues that cit­i­zens need to fly high­er than ever, not “play it safe.” He spends most of the book argu­ing that economies reward art, not com­pli­ance. In the past, work­ers were reward­ed for play­ing by the rules. Not any more.

Godin argues that the fol­low­ing traits are impor­tant in the new economy:

Trust and per­mis­sion: We do busi­ness with those indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions that have earned our atten­tion. “We seek out peo­ple who tell us sto­ries that res­onate, we lis­ten to those sto­ries, and we engage with those people…who delight.”

Remark­a­bil­i­ty: We are drawn to those com­pa­nies or indi­vid­u­als that stand out, who are dif­fer­ent. No one sits around talk­ing about the com­pa­ny or per­son who blends in with every­one else.

Lead­er­ship: Lead­ers are com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als who take risks and take us all to a dif­fer­ent place. An obvi­ous exam­ple is Steve Jobs, who rev­o­lu­tion­ized how we lis­ten to music and over­saw the cre­ation of the iPhone and iPad.

Sto­ries that spread: This involves deliv­er­ing a mes­sage that is worth­while to spread. “After trust is earned and your work is seen, only a frac­tion of it is mag­i­cal enough to be worth spread­ing. Again this mag­ic is the work of the human artist, not the cor­po­rate machine,” writes Godin.

Human­i­ty: Instead of focus­ing on just the cheap­est prod­uct, we focus on orig­i­nal­i­ty and car­ing instead.

How do these traits apply to tech­ni­cal communications?

Cred­i­bil­i­ty and trust: We must ensure that the con­tent that we write is tech­ni­cal­ly accu­rate. Not real­ly sur­pris­ing, giv­en that this is the pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty of our jobs. When I start­ed in this career, I tend­ed to rely on Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts to vet my con­tent. Some SMEs are excel­lent at review­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments; most don’t have the time or inter­est to review large doc­u­ments. I real­ized that it’s ulti­mate­ly up to me to make sure the con­tent is as accu­rate as pos­si­ble. Over time, I try to immerse myself in the sub­ject so that I become a qua­si-SME on a sub­ject.  In addi­tion, I strive to do what I say I will do. It is sim­ple advice but it’s sur­pris­ing how many peo­ple will say one thing and do anoth­er. Or do nothing.

Remark­a­bil­i­ty: Scan most tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion job adver­tise­ments and com­pa­nies want some vari­a­tion of the fol­low­ing skills:

  • Expe­ri­ence with dif­fer­ent author­ing tools: Word, FrameMak­er, Mad­cap Flare, Acro­bat, Robo­Help, Share­Point, Cap­ti­vate, and so on.
  • Demon­strat­ed writ­ing skills and a relat­ed cer­tifi­cate or degree.
  • Abil­i­ty to jug­gle mul­ti­ple priorities.
  • Abil­i­ty to work well with others.
  • Demon­strat­ed self-starter.
  • And so on…

For a giv­en job, let’s say 20 can­di­dates apply for the job, includ­ing you. How are you dif­fer­ent? What skills and per­son­al­i­ty do you pos­sess that are dif­fer­ent than the oth­er can­di­dates? Being the same as every­one else—essentially blend­ing in—is not a strength. Per­haps you have expe­ri­ence writ­ing con­tent for mobile? Have you worked as an instruc­tion­al design­er or busi­ness ana­lyst? Do you have deep domain knowl­edge on a giv­en sub­ject? Is your atti­tude a dif­fer­en­tia­tor? Do you guar­an­tee your work?

I’d sug­gest you think about and cul­ti­vate your dif­fer­en­tia­tors so you stand out from the pack.

Mak­ing con­nec­tions: Tech­ni­cal writ­ers gen­er­al­ly aren’t the life of the par­ty. They don’t go out of their way to con­nect with oth­ers. They focus on their deliv­er­ables, not fos­ter­ing a network.

There are excep­tions. There’s one writer I know who real­ly makes an effort to meet oth­ers for a cof­fee. He enjoys it. And he ben­e­fits from this effort: he fre­quent­ly hears of con­tract jobs before they are adver­tised. Oth­er writ­ers rec­og­nize that he excels at networking.

As writ­ers, we could all ben­e­fit from mak­ing con­nec­tions with oth­ers, whether it’s anoth­er writer, or anoth­er con­trac­tor on your team, or a poten­tial employer.

Do you agree? How can tech­ni­cal writ­ers demon­strate trust, remark­a­bil­i­ty, lead­er­ship, sto­ry­telling, and an abil­i­ty to make connections?

Controlling alignment and orphans in an EPUB file

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This blog entry explains some tips and tricks on how to con­trol align­ment and wid­ows and orphans in an EPUB file.

Some basics

An EPUB doc­u­ment is a zip file with the .epub exten­sion. EPUB files can be read using e‑reader soft­ware on many devices includ­ing the iPad, iPhone, PCs, and smart­phones run­ning on Android.

For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, I believe EPUB files are one of the tech­nolo­gies to watch. The iBooks book­store sells its e‑books in an EPUB file for­mat. With tablets and smart­phones out­selling PCs, users are increas­ing­ly read­ing content—including tech­ni­cal communications—on these devices. Help Author­ing Tools also make it easy to cre­ate EPUB files.

Controlling alignment

In your Help Author­ing Tool, you can spec­i­fy your text align­ment. Most of the time, tech­ni­cal writ­ers left-align their con­tent. But if you are view­ing your EPUB file on an iPad, it over­rides your align­ment set­tings and presents the con­tent as justified.

Here’s an exam­ple of jus­ti­fied align­ment on an iPad:

EPUB file shown on an iPad

For­tu­nate­ly, you can over­ride the iPad settings.

The eas­i­est way to do this is by ask­ing users to make a con­fig­u­ra­tion change on the iPad. As this is a pret­ty straight­for­ward change, I think it’s rea­son­able to ask users to fol­low a few steps.

To change the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion set­tings on your iPad:

  1. Go to Set­tings on your iPad.
  2. Go under your Apps set­tings and click iBooks.

Settings screen on an iPad

  1. Turn off Full Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to over­ride the settings.
  2. Open an EPUB file in iBooks.

Your con­tent is then aligned the way you designed it.

Controlling widows and orphans

In some e‑readers, you can con­trol wid­ows and orphans. A wid­ow is the last line of a para­graph, marooned on one side of a page break. Here is an example:

Example of widow in an EPUB file

An orphan is a word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph.

Using the Cas­cad­ing Style Sheet (CSS) in your EPUB project, you can con­trol wid­ows and orphans in Adobe Dig­i­tal Edi­tions and Nook. As of May 2013, you can­not con­trol wid­ows and orphans in iBooks.

Unzipping an EPUB

Com­plete the fol­low­ing steps to unzip your EPUB file: 

  1. Locate your EPUB file.
  2. Change the .epub exten­sion to .zip.
  3. Unzip the con­tents of the folder.
  4. Dou­ble-click the OEBPS fold­er (“OEBPS” stands for Open eBook Pub­li­ca­tion Structure).

Structure of EPUB

  1. Locate the default.css file. This is your CSS file.

Editing your CSS

Using a text edi­tor, type the fol­low­ing code that spec­i­fies the for­mat­ting for wid­ows and orphans.

widows_orphans_CSS

For the para­graph tag (“p”), the high­light­ed exam­ple ensures that at least two lines of con­tent appear togeth­er at the bot­tom or top of a page so that you don’t have sin­gle-line wid­ows and orphans. Of course, you can change the val­ue to what­ev­er you prefer.

Next steps

After you make changes to the CSS, re-zip the EPUB project, rename so it uses an .epub exten­sion, and test it on all the dif­fer­ent e‑readers that your users may be using. Dif­fer­ent e‑readers may ren­der your EPUB file dif­fer­ent­ly so test­ing is vital.

I am speak­ing about for­mat­ting EPUB files at the Cana­da West Chap­ter of the STC on July 16th, 2013.

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290