It's a memoir/travelog: An author from India travels in the USA in the 1950s. Although at the time he liked America, with some hindsight, this book reminds us that "the good old days" were not so good after all. At the time, the intelligentsia thought of India as "cool"—but of course it was largely a strange version of India as projected by folks who knew just enough to appear silly. Traveling in the South, his dark skin means he's not supposed to ride in the front of the bus. He goes to a Key station, the old San Francisco commuter train system, and I perked up, ready for a nostalgic tale of a local transit system of yesteryear—but drunken louts try to shake him down for money in the station so…yeah, not so much with the glowing nostalgia. Traveling wasn't so easy back in those days of not-so-advanced communications systems. Folks might say "oh yeah, before the web you couldn't just go online to shop for travel tickets, you had to talk to people." But it wasn't just that; long-distance calls were expensive and complex; talking to far-away people to reserve tickets/whatever wasn't to be taken lightly. And one can't help but wonder if conductors would have kept ignoring his first-class tickets and tossing him into coach if he'd had lighter skin…
It wasn't all miserable times back then. He has fine conversations about literature with Authors You've Heard Of. He has fun conversations about other things. Nice folks welcome him into their homes. He tours movie studios and other things. He liked the Grand Canyon, which shows his good judgement; the Grand Canyon is still pretty good. I'm glad Senthil Kumaran loaned me this book; thanks, Senthil!
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Book Report: The Checklist Manifesto
We humans are inordinately proud that we're somewhat cleverer than lizards. The good news is that we can do some complex things. The bad news is that we think we're really great at handling that comp...
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Jotting Notes on Sara Thacher's ADG Talk
She designs experiences. She worked on the Games of Nonchalance, Futurecoast; nowadays she can't tell us about her exciting work in Disney Imagineering. Barthe's Death of the Author: just because yo...
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Link: Documentation, Support, and Customer Success
Anything worth documenting is worth documenting well. But not everything is worth documenting. And I think this guy would agree with me: Recently I’ve started to see documentation as a psychologic...
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Link: "The Best API Documentation"
A blogger blogs about goals for API Documentation. He starts with the important two questions: Who is the audience? What are they trying to do? …though he doesn't phrase it that way. ...
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Book Report: A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling
There are plenty of storytellers out there, but they tend to specialize. Meanwhile, these transmedia projects keep popping up: some story-pieces embedded in movies, comics, ARGs, radio plays… ...
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FAQs, Facts, Drowning in Questions
You're a small team of software developers. You make a service|API|tool|thingy used by many, many software developers. They have questions, so many questions. You're drowning in questions. How can yo...
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Book Report: Shady Characters
Thursday afternoon, talk at work turned to punctuation. Since work uses a lot of @s and #s, this should not surprise you. Someone hazily remembered that Shakespeare had invented “modern quotati...
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Book Report: Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate
I'm a technical writer. I understand that folks don't always appreciate technical documentation. Sometimes the docs are bad. Sometimes the docs are good…at bearing bad tidings. Tech writer Roz...
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Book Report: The Art of Explanation
I'm a tech writer. "Professional Ignoramus" would be a more accurate job title, albeit not so likely to land me fun jobs working with clever software developers. Still, it's what I do. Here's what ha...
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Link: Audience and Technical Writing
E Nashif took some time off from studying to riff about Audience in technical writing. Audience, composition classes, and technical writing Audience, technical writing, ownership, etc (part 2?) O...
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Link: Drawing versus Writing Pencils
If you doubted my sharp-pencils-aren't-so-great rant, check this out: Drawing versus Writing Pencils. Focus on the user; the ideal pencil sharpness follows the user's intent. ...
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not exemplary
I laughed at @sec_reactions so much that I decided to make a Tech Writing Reactions tumblr. But then I realized that would take effort, so instead I just captioned one Star Trek photo. ...
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Book Report: How to Sharpen Pencils
I'm a technical writer. I write instructions. I often team up with a "Subject Matter Expert," someone who's really good at doing something. I ask them what they do and they write it down. You might w...
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Scala, part of the new gig
Bumped into @kberg and @adamsah yestere'en. We talked about work. They said interesting things which I won't repeat because oh man what if one of them accidentally let slip some confidential informat...
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Presentation: Tech Writing for non-Tech Writers
I'm a rara avis at Twitter, the only full-time technical writer. As such, my life is that of a celebrity: I'm constantly being invited to events, everybody wants to be seen with me, etc etc. At least...
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@ikai pointed out an unintentionally funny article The Real Reason Silicon Valley Coders Write Bad Software. The reason? Because they aren't better English writers. This article made it into the Atla...
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Twitter is Hiring a Tech Writer
...or maybe more than one. I dunno, @JoinTheFlock is mysterious to me. I didn't even know the listing was up until someone told me. Am I under a non-solicit thingy with you? I.e., do you work at Goo...
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From the list of recent edits to Scala School, a tutorial for the Scala programming language, you might guess that puzzle nerds were trying to sneak in some easter eggs: You'd see a bunch of changes ...
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Link: Your free software website
I am a technical writer. Within technical writing, as with other kinds of writing, there are genres. Genres are defined by rules. If you want to write the web page for an open-source project, these a...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
Is [some of] your team hoping to head to Portland for The WarTron Game? If so, I'd like to tag along as an "embedded reporter". I.e., I'd play the game with y'all and write it up afterwards. Folks ar...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and worth documenting if you ship them to Seattle or something
I'm catching up (caught up now) on Snoutcasts, and just listened to the BANG 28 Debrief. You might wonder: what information was in the BANG 28 puzzle playbook? Folks kept raving about it (and about t...
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As a professional technical writer, I am always on the look-out for documentation "success stories." Documentation, when done right, can improve lives. For example, this evening on the bus ride home...
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Book Report: The Art of Game Design
The Art of Game Design is pretty awesome. This book is about design. In theory, it's about game design. But if you're designing something for humans, this book contains plenty of wisdom. I think thi...
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Link: MobNotate
The next time someone wants me to mark up their manuscript, I might suggest they use MobNotate to gather feedback. ...
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Technical Writing Student Internships
Google is taking technical writing interns this summer. Yeah, everyone at Google's a genius and should never ever need anything explained to them. OMG especially not by some wet-behind-the-ears compu...
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If you recently guessed SCOUT VAILLANCOURT FOUNTAIN in the 2-Tone Game, try entering SCOUT again. I tried to clarify the wording a bit. If you didn't guess SCOUT VAILLANCOURT FOUNTAIN, then carry on...
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"What is a Content Management System?"
At the GC Summit, Debbie mentioned that the organizers of the excellent DASH treasure hunt game will start using a content management system to keep track of their puzzles. Someone in the audience a...
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