About a dozen or so years ago at a conference, there was a presentation about the practice of using keys in DITA, and when it came time for questions, someone in the crowd asked “Why don’t we just use variables like we do in FrameMaker?” Coming from a FrameMaker background, still being relatively new toRead More
For several years a key focus of artificial intelligence (AI) as applied to technical documentation has been on using it as a basis for chatbots. I worked for a consulting firm that touted the benefits of structured content (DITA) that could be applied this way. But somehow, I think the more obvious approach of usingRead More
Recently, I had to delve into how to create and display glossaries for DITA-based documents. One of the problems was that, while I could find information about how all of the individual pieces for a DITA glossary work, there was nothing I could find online describing how it was all put together. This article isRead More
I did an interview recently with Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium, where I talked about the current state of the technical writing job market. This comes as a result of my pouring over a decade’s worth of technical writer job posting data. This is now available as a podcast, and works as a good companion pieceRead More
I don’t want to seem all doom and gloom, especially after the previous post on technical writing jobs in general, but I want to talk about some interesting trends that I am seeing. And one of those is a distinct drop in job postings for technical writers with DITA experience. Right now, they account forRead More
Update: It’s been a couple of months since my last post, and there is now solid evidence that we are in a downturn for technical writer job postings. This is not a huge surprise, given all of the recent economic woes making the news. It also matches what I am hearing from others about variousRead More
This is the first in a series of pieces that examine trends in the technical writing job market over the past decade. Long-time readers of this blog will know I have been keeping track of technical writer job postings from Indeed.com for a while now. Indeed.com was the first job aggregator website and has beenRead More
While I will not be there in person at this year’s ConVEx 2022 conference in Tempe, AZ, I will be doing a couple of virtual presentations. The first is called “From Papyrus to the Virtual Elephants in Rooms” that I will be doing with co-presenter Jo Lam. The scope of this presentation looks at howRead More
The DITA 2.0 specification is still a work in progress by the members of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee (which includes me), but it is inching ever-nearer to release. At the time of writing (early March 2022), pretty much all of the proposals for what will go into the new standard have been made, andRead More
One of my favorite technical communication conferences is LavaCon, hosted annually by its ebullient host and organizer Jack Molisani. I’ve been heading to them since at least 2015, and the location of the venues has always been fun (places like New Orleans and Las Vegas, to name a couple), and perhaps in part because ofRead More
