The blog offers my views on various topics and how they relate to technical communication.

I’ve been a senior technical writer at Oracle Canada in Toronto, and have worked in software and technical communication since the early 1990s.

Valuable, well-designed information that can be easily accessed and understood is critically important. As Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, “the most valuable commodity I know of is information.” The challenge is to get the right information from the right sources, and then act on it.

Documentation itself is rapidly evolving from its traditional page/chapter/book format to a pure object-oriented format, in much the same way that programming code has evolved. Text reuse is not an option in my “book” – it is an absolute necessity. Content needs to be separate from its form.

Currently, many technical writers function both as information developers and information designers. Eventually, we’ll need to specialize in one of these areas, the same way that architects create the basic structure or architecture of a house, and interior designers work with the interior and content of the same house.

Enjoy the blog!

Andrew