I spent about three hours today making one. It's not as easy as you'd think.

I was unexpectedly (to me, anyway) assigned to a new project in another division. That means turning about half my work to a junior tech writer in my division. And all those little things you take for granted when things are running smoothly? It takes a long time to capture them. Even when you have good processes in place.

It took me three hours to write down all the basics of the project for her…

I just shared Tom Johnson's latest blog post (via our own Mark Baker) with my team at the office, and decided it's worth sharing here as well. Here's what I wrote (rapid reaction):

http://idratherbewriting.com/2012/07/31/misconceptions-about-topic-based-authoring/

He’s arguing that users “adapt” to unhelpful user manuals by skimming, but what if we make them more…

One of my first rules of writing is that rules are useless if you can't break them when you have a compelling reason. I'm hardly a revolutionary (my wife says I'm a square), but I also refuse to participate in a tautology of rules.

The rule goes like this: "Spell acronyms out on first use; abbreviate thereafter." Not a bad rule, but if you press in hard on the why of it, it starts to smell an awful lot like cover-your-arse (that's CYA). We get so busy avoiding the gotcha…

For those of you who don't know R.J., he used to be a product evangelist for Adobe before he got caught up in downsizing or restructuring or whatever they're calling it. His webinars and blog posts helped me out a lot as I was learning Adobe TCS2 and trying to figure out new ways to use it (here's looking at you, FrameMaker to RoboHelp conversion process). He's still a great follow on Twitter (@rjacquez) or anywhere else, including…