The Not-Boring Tech Writer

As the tech comm industry develops, technical writers must embrace a sobering truth: As Dr. Stan Dicks writes in Digital Literacy for Technical Communication, “Technical communicators who add value to their organizations do not merely write and edit documents.”

So how do we prepare for the future of tech comm so we can ensure we’re adding value to our organizations?

Preparing for the future is difficult without a compass – but fortunately – Ted Hudek, Senior Programming Writer at Microsoft, knows the way.

In this episode, Ted shares his tips on how you can prepare for the future of tech comm, including:

• why you should always have a side learning project.
• why you should not freak out about tools.
• why you should actively build relationships with your colleagues.

The Show Notes:

• Episode #5 with Eric Holscher
• Episode #6 with Neal Kaplan
• Write the Docs on Slack
• Write the Docs Meetups
• Ted Hudek on Twitter
  
  

We’ve all experienced the joy of community: colleagues mentor you; friends encourage you; strangers point you towards their favorite pizza shop downtown.

For that moment, whether you had previous ties to each other or not, you feel that sense of community.

And while every community is unique, one concept is constant: As urbanist Charles Montgomery defines it, “people gathering, talking, and helping one another everyday.”

Eric Holscher (today’s podcast guest) and Troy Howard have captured that concept and created a community for us – the tech writers.

The community: Write the Docs.

In this episode, Eric shares the story of Write the Docs and describes the power of getting involved in a community, including:

• why tech writers need community.
• how to Write the Docs empowers tech writers.
• how to get the greatest value from community.

The Show Notes:

• Ericholscher.com
• Eric Holscher on Twitter
• Writethedocs.org
• Write the Docs on Twitter
• Write the Docs resources

Where should user experience (UX) design fit in the technical writer’s toolbox?

Well, think about how your users experience your documentation:
Are they following a workflow path, following a series of pages to complete a series of tasks sequentially?

• Are they following nav links, jumping around to find task-specific information?

Understanding how your users experience your documentation is understanding UX design – which can make or break your docs’ usability.

As our guest and UX designer Autumn Hood describes it: “You can’t have good technical communication without good UX design.”

In this episode, you’ll learn how to think like a UX designer so you can create an effective documentation experience for your users.

The Show Notes:

• Janice Redish’s Understanding Readers
• Susan Weinschenk’s ROI of User Research webinar
• Autumn Hood on Twitter
• Autumn Hood on LinkedIn

Meet our new host Kate Mueller and get the inside scoop on how The Not-Boring Tech Writer (TNBTW) will work moving forward.

Kate Mueller is the Documentation Goddess of KnowledgeOwl, a seasoned technical writer and owner of knowledgewithsass, a knowledge management coaching service. She’s written and maintained documentation for companies in broadcasting, financial services, IT, and software for 15+ years. She’ll be hosting TNBTW moving forward.

In this episode, Kate discusses her vision for TNBTW: a podcast dedicated to everyone who is writing technical documentation, including those who may not feel comfortable calling themselves tech writers. Whether you create product documentation, support documentation, READMEs, or any other technical content—and whether you deal with imposter syndrome, lack formal training, or find yourself somewhere in the gray area between technical communications and general writing—the TNBTW reboot might be your new favorite podcast. Kate talks about her own imposter syndrome using the tech writer label and recounts her tech writer villain origin story.

We plan to release two episodes per month: one episode will maintain the traditional TNBTW format of interviewing a guest and focusing on useful skills or tools that can help you improve your tech writing skills; the other episode will be a behind-the-scenes look into what Kate’s working on, struggling with, or thinking about in her daily tech writing life.

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Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team:

We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback:

• Email: [email protected]
• Bluesky
  
  

Contact Kate Mueller:

• LinkedIn
• knowledgewithsass.com
  
  

Contact KnowledgeOwl:

• KnowledgeOwl.com
• LinkedIn

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Transcript

Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills, and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community.
In today's episode, we relaunch the podcast and introduce you to our new (and hopefully not-boring) host. Spoiler, I'm neither Jacob nor Jared. My name is Kate Mueller. Hi, nice to meet you. When KnowledgeOwl decided to relaunch The Not-Boring Tech Writer, they asked me to serve as the host and my first thought was immediate panic. Am I a real enough tech writer to host this show? I feel more like a 'Pinocchio' tech writer. What if everybody figures it out? I'm not formally trained in technical communication or technical writing, and I do have formal training in both writing, generally at an information management, but I've never been super confident or comfortable with the title of tech writer. I've been doing technical writing for at least the last 15 years. I started with documenting databases I designed and built for coworkers to give them instructions on how to use them. Then I moved into user guides for third party software my company used, and eventually ended up writing support documentation for the software companies I worked for. I've helped write app copy and microcopy in two software products. I've written release notes and product newsletters and 'Getting Started' guides, and I've taken thousands of screenshots. Working at KnowledgeOwl, I've brainstormed and advised customers on all kinds of things, including information architecture, content best practices, authoring and auditing processes, and getting buy-in and managing new knowledge base rollouts. I've created the first formal knowledge based places. I've migrated from one knowledge platform to another. I've trained people, I've mentored younger writers. I've spent the last 15 years taking complicated, highly technical tools and breaking them into easier to understand components. I've written documentation for technical and non-technical users and I've had to find ways to explain and simplify things that, 48 hours before, I'd never even heard of.

Kate Mueller: [00:02:26] These are all valuable technical writing skills, but I still kind of felt like an imposter offering to host a podcast about tech writing. I can't really say why I didn't feel technical enough to host this podcast. I guess, I don't write code, so there's that. I've never created a DOCSIS code pipeline from scratch. I'm not very good with using automating tools or anything that involves code, especially conditionals and loops, and I haven't been formally trained on it. I didn't go get a...

My current in-flight projects include updating nearly all of our documentation to reflect major changes to our user interface, which includes changes to screenshots, navigation options, and section/subsection labels. I’m also working on my long slog to convert all our screenshots from .png to .webp format. As I make all of those updates, I’m bringing our content into line with our current style guide (the first time I’ve used an explicit style guide in the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base).

I recently finished teaching my first Knowledge Management Master Class with KnowledgeOwl. This was mostly a success, though it was a sharp learning curve for me and I’m already full of ideas on what to do differently next time. It also humbled me since it made me view my own docs through the lens of all the best practices I was suggesting people employ–and realizing how often my docs fell short.

For me, the most fascinating takeaway was really digging into the concept of concept types or information typing. I’ve never done this as an explicit, intentional exercise. After researching various approaches, I’m sold on the underlying concept. My plan is to create some templates for each major content type, using The Good Docs Project’s templates as a starting point). I’m then going to use those templates as I update content in our Features category to test and refine the templates before gradually applying them to the entire knowledge base. I’ll be using tags to track my progress and identify the content type for each page, too. In Episode 5, I’ll report back on how I’m doing in my endeavors!

Resources discussed in this episode:

• KnowledgeOwl Support KB
• Diátaxis content types for software documentation
• Dave Gash’s A Painless Introduction to Information Typing, which is a pretty solid introduction to Information Typing as it’s used in DITA and other frameworks
• The Good Docs Project
• Wisdom Wednesday on Use tags + Manage filters for fast docs updates/audits: Kate’s quick walkthrough on how she uses tags and Manage filters in KnowledgeOwl for content audits and updates

—

Contact The Not-Boring Tech Writer team:

We love hearing your ideas for episode topics, guests, or general feedback:

• Email: [email protected]
• Bluesky
  
  

Contact Kate Mueller:

• LinkedIn
• knowledgewithsass.com
  
  

Contact KnowledgeOwl:

• KnowledgeOwl.com
  
  

—

Transcript

Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. Hello fellow not-boring tech writers. I'm Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I'm thinking about or working on, or both. I'm recording this episode in early December, right after Assad's ouster and the murder of the UnitedHealthCare CEO, just for some context. So first up, what am I working on? I'm in the midst of making a lot of updates to the KnowledgeOwl support knowledge base. KnowledgeOwl has released a lot of UI changes in the last couple of months, which of course I got behind on, so now I'm working to get our screenshots and text updated from those changes, while knowing that there are more changes coming in the next few months too. This has been a lot of changes. We changed our whole color palette, we changed a lot of the user interface key elements, we also just rolled out a totally different left hand navigation so I've got my work cut out for me. But it's a good exercise because it's prompted me to really evaluate how useful a lot of those screenshots are and whether we actually need them. In particular, there are a lot of older articles where I used screenshots of code as a final example for some of our step by step documentation, and I'm gradually replac...