Technical Writing ToolBox

A Blog on Technical Writing

Category Archives: Tutorial

Higher Education in Technical Communication- Is it worth it?

11 Comments Posted by Gurpreet Singh on July 3, 2012

Technical Communicators are passionate about learning and often ponder on the question of higher education in the field of technical communication. The dream of gaining knowledge and credibility by pursuing higher education in technical writing often eludes technical writers at all levels of their career.

Gurpreet’s First Day @Seneca College

I worked as a technical writer for eight years in New Delhi and recently took a sabbatical to pursue a postgraduate certificate in technical communication from Seneca College, Toronto. The term sabbatical (from Latin ‘sabbaticus’, from Greek ‘sabbatikos’, from Hebrew shabbat, i.e., Sabbath, literally a “ceasing”) means to take a break from work for an extended period of time to pursue a goal. In modern times, several professionals have started taking a sabbatical to pursue higher education in their chosen disciplines.

My STC Presentation on Effective Presentation Skills

Leave a comment Posted by Gurpreet Singh on June 15, 2012

I conducted a skills development workshop for STC India (New Delhi) chapter two years ago. The workshop was warmly appreciated by the participants. The slide along with text transcript is available in this post.

Though the presentation shared in this post is two years old, the basic principles of presentation has not changed much in the past hundred years.

Difference between Task, Concept, and Reference topics in DITA

9 Comments Posted by Gurpreet Singh on May 31, 2012

Task, Concept, and Reference in DITA

Note: The content on this page is based on work done by Bernard Aschwanden of
http://www.publishingsmarter.com and is used with permission.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) specifies three basic topic types: Task, Concept, and Reference. However, people often get confused about these three types. Our cool (and knowledgeable) professor Bernard Aschwanden (he is an expert in DITA!) gave us an interesting exercise to differentiate between the three topic types in DITA.

How to set your Freelance Writing Rates?

20 Comments Posted by Gurpreet Singh on April 3, 2012

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2002-08-28/

Photo Credit: Dilbert.com

Writers working on a freelance basis often face difficulty in deciding the method to provide a quote to their clients. Whether they should charge on the basis of pages, assignment, or, hour et al. I will describe a few payment methods I’ve used as a freelance technical writer. Only you can decide the payment method suitable for your freelance writing assignments as each assignment is different.

Freelance writers, many times in their career, wonder about the method they should use for their writing assignments. While it seems an easy and good way to use one particular method for all types of writing assignments, the variety of projects having different requirements make it almost impossible to use a standard payment method.

10 Twitter hashtags for #TechnicalWriters

5 Comments Posted by Gurpreet Singh on March 30, 2012

Twitter is becoming a useful media for sharing information. Many technical writers (including me; my twitter id is @gurpreetwrites) have started using this media to spread information, news, and sometimes their opinion about technical writing. Tom Johnson also blogged about using hashtags on mobile.

The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. A hashtag makes it easier to follow a particular profession (such as technical writing or software development) or an event (such as conference).