Dewdney Media Inc.

Reg Gothard - "Yonder Pedant"

Tech Writer Value

Clarity: Ambiguous Words

This week’s piece focuses on a couple of words that always cause confusion. What do you understand by the words biweekly, bimonthly, and biannually? And for bonus marks, what do you understand by bicentenary and bimillenary? Let’s use biweekly and bimonthly to illustrate the problem. They actually mean nearly the same thing. Or they don’t. […]

What Does a Technical Writer Do?

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve tried to answer this question I’d be able to afford that multi-month trip to New Zealand that’s on my bucket list! I have this vague memory of a Wonder Years episode in which Coach Cutlip asks the class what a jock strap is for. To me, […]

Is This Why Technical Writers Are Needed?

In my experience, businesses and organizations, especially medium-sized businesses, don’t understand why they should pay someone to write documentation for them when they have perfectly good subject matter experts (SMEs)  who know the product or service inside out, back-to-front, and upside down. Other “Yonder Pedant” articles (currently in draft form as of January2016) cover what […]

Writing Style

Writing style can be viewed as a spectrum, with material such as legislation at one end and teen-text at the other. It’s important to recognize the wide variation in styles and to be able to choose and use the correct one. Written communication is not as effective as face-to-face because body language and tone of […]

The Importance of Writing Correctly

The more permanent a piece of writing is expected to be, the more important it is that it be error-free. The Post-it® on your fridge doesn’t have to contain correctly-formed English (although some smart-alec might point any shortcomings out to you). At the other end of the spectrum, artifacts such as the Bible, the American […]

Creating Whitespace in MS Word

Evolution and the Infinite Number of Monkeys Theory When word processing programs like Microsoft Word came along, it made typing pools all-but obsolete and placed the creation of documents literally at the fingertips of document authors. True story – I wrote a script for a pantomime in the 1980s and typed it into a programming […]

Brevity, Clarity, Civility

Although the title of today’s piece sounds like a parody of the French national motto, it’s actually about balance; balance between being brief (concise), being clear, and being civil or polite. It’s reasonably well known that emails and texts can be misinterpreted. It’s also reasonably well known that a good deal of the underlying problem […]

Readability Scores

One of the things that surprised me when I trained to be a Technical Writer was the tutor’s assertion that we write to a grade eight level. (For those outside of North America, grade eight students are roughly 14 years old.) We were then pointed at the readability measurement feature of MS Word. The readability […]

Dewdney Media Inc. © 2015 Frontier Theme