Daily Technical Writing Articles >> August 26-30 Digest

Welcome to the Daily Technical Writing Articles group! This week's digest includes some of the group's most popular articles to date. Target audiences of these pieces are IT professionals, technical writers, recruiters, and HR managers.

Monday >> The 9th Technical Writing Pillar: AI

Tuesday >> White Papers: What Every Tech Writer Should Know

Wednesday >> Technical Writers: Master the Art of Humblebragging

Thursday >> Social Media Guidance for Technical Writers

Friday >> SOPs: Enabling Organizational Process Tuning for Efficiency

Podcast Coming

In the near future, I'll be launching a podcast about technical writing in the enterprise. I think the best way to build community and provide true value is to offer quality content in a variety of media formats. I preach to my clients that they should be communicating with internal and external target audiences via text, audio, and video. I'm going to eat my own dog food here and do the same.

Like my articles, podcast episodes will be short, educational, and never waste your time. I will interview guests with expertise in tech writing, AI, enterprise communications, documentation, marketing, software development, sales, and more.

In the Industry this Week

In IT and tech industry news, Intel is suffering after a number of negative developments, including the August news that it is laying off 15 percent of its workforce. Apple jumped ship a couple of years ago with its own M series silicon and Microsoft has for a long time been working with competing chipmakers like AMD and Qualcomm. Will Intel survive? Was the migration to M chips by Macs another nail in the company's coffin? Some are predicting the demise of this stalwart institute of American business. Only time will tell.

AI companies and talking heads continue to proliferate at an alarming rate. OpenAI was recently valued at more than $100 billion dollars and has attracted Apple as an investor. AI image generator Ideogram 2 has been praised by the tech press for such an impressive upgrade and is being hailed by many as the king of image gens. It is particularly good at generating text within images.

Instead of riding the Boeing Starliner back to earth, as planned, the stranded astronauts will hitch a ride with SpaceX aboard its Dragon capsule—but not until February of 2025.

In aerospace news, the Boeing Starliner continues to suffer failures that erode the trust of the public and NASA alike. This time it is making a strange and—thus far—unexplainable sound. This is in addition to thruster problems and hydrogen leaks in the vehicle.

Reported Ars Technica: "There was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. 'Alright Butch, that one came through,' mission control radioed. 'It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.'" These issues are severe enough that NASA announced this week in a press conference that the two astronauts aboard the Starliner will not return to earth on the vessel in early September due to safety concerns. The Starliner will instead come to earth uncrewed.

The stranded astronauts will hitch a ride with SpaceX aboard its Dragon capsule—but not until February of 2025, more than six months after they were originally scheduled to return. "It was just too much risk for the crew," said a commercial crew program manager at NASA, Steve Stich.

Comment of the Week

Every week, I feature one or two comments from followers and group members. Thank you to all readers, but particularly those who take the time to engage, share success stories, and help spread these educational articles among their followers.

The white paper article linked above is one of the group's most popular. A follower in Pittsburgh (a great place to film a Jack Reacher movie) said:

"Thank you for this exceptional guide on writing white papers. It is probably the most useful, easily understood, and comprehensive guide I have ever read on this simple yet complex topic. I am saving your article as a reference."

Honorable mention goes to a follower in gorgeous Colorado Springs who DMed me the following:

"Mr. Robbins, thank you for publishing such insightful articles. I'm a technical writer breaking into 1) a new career field for myself and 2) a workplace that hasn't ever employed a technical writer. I find myself leaning on information you so eloquently provide in order to inform my managers of the products and process I can provide. I appreciate what you do for me and our community of writers!"

That's what I'm striving to build here: A vibrant and inspiring community of IT pros and tech writers that makes it easy and—dare I say it?—even fun to network and succeed in the arena of enterprise documentation. It should be fun to advance in our careers and make our clients and bosses happy. Never apologize for having fun and bringing passion to a job you love.

Tech Writing Pro Tip: Hashtags

If you didn't catch this week's Tech Writing Pro Tip in your feed (follow to never miss one), it provided insight into how to format hashtags in social media posts. Many physically challenged users, including the blind and those with dyslexia, use screen readers to help them consume text-based content.

When your social media hashtags do not feature initial caps, the text parsers of screen reading software cannot discern the individual words and, thus, mispronounce them. For a user dependent on the proper interpretation and pronunciation of content by their computer or smartphone, this is a big deal.

A nice thing about use of initial caps in your social media hashtags (beyond doing the right thing to help others) is that it costs nothing and is easy to implement. After it becomes habit and muscle memory, you won't even think about the fact that you're doing it correctly.

Coming Next Week

Next week will be a highly education one, with articles about the tremendous efficiency of templates, tips & tricks for tech writers, the importance of discipline and rigor in technical writing, advice for remote IT professionals, and—of course—more about everyone's favorite trending tech topic, AI and LLMs.

Thank You

Thank you for helping build the Daily Technical Writing Articles community. I promise to teach you a few things along the way and make it worth your time.

— Curt Robbins, Senior Technical Writer