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The podcasts I record for I'd Rather Be Writing cover the latest trends in technical communication. I interview tech writing luminaries around the world as well as record STC presentations and other audio content. You can subscribe to podcast specific feeds using the subscription information below.
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Podcast: Riding the Tide of Technical Communications Consulting
Thursday, January 21st, 2010 Posted in Podcasts, Technical Writing | 4 Comments »
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Length: 90 min.
Lyn Worthen presented to the STC Intermountain chapter tonight on running your own business as a technical communications consultant. She covers almost everything you need to know as a consultant, including rates, billing, contracts, marketing, taxes, business structures, hours, salary, tools, locations, niche services, portfolios, client communications, and more.
Here’s her presentation description:
Unlike the consistent schedule, workload, and wages of a 9-5 technical writing job, going it on your own as a consultant or contractor is a lot like riding the tide. Sometimes the tide is “in” and you have plenty of work to keep you happily tapping away on your keyboard; the projects are queuing up, the money is flowing, and all’s right with the world.
Other times, the tide is “out” and you find yourself walking on a desolate beach, staring out at the horizon, waiting for your ship to come in — and, if you’re lucky, picking up the occasional small job still lurking in a hidden tidal pool; money is scarce, and as the siren song of Corporate America tempts you back into the relative stability of captured employment, you question the wisdom of continuing to go it alone.
And then there are the “tsunamis,” those times when you have more work than one person should ever be expected to handle; yet in spite of the fact that you’re barely keeping your head above water, you’re reluctant to say “no” to any of it because you don’t know how high the floodwaters will rise or how long the drought that is sure to follow will last.
About Lyn Worthen
Lyn Worthen’s company is Information Design Co: Technical Communications Consulting, based in Utah and serving local, national, and international clients. Lyn is a member of the STC, the Utah Women Tech Council (WTC), and National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). You can find out more about her through her Linkedin page. To contact Lyn, send her an email at lynw@xmission.com.
Read more..Podcast: The Myth of Single Sourcing
Monday, December 21st, 2009 Posted in Podcasts | 6 Comments »
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Length: 38 min.
In his controversial post, The Myth of Single Sourcing, Michael Hiatt explains:
Single-source publishing is a zombie idea that revives itself periodically and refuses to stay dead. Its zombie supporters chant its purported benefits as a “write once, publish to many” promise and ploddingly follow it as their ultimate goal for mechanized authoring and machine translation. As an object-oriented writing methodology, it is as human as present-day robot technology—good only for conveyor belt assembly or specialized tasks, and always very expensive to implement. Single-source publishing lacks purpose in today’s world of information turnover and the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 moving to Web 3.0 landscape.
In other words, single sourcing your content across the enterprise is an idea that simply doesn’t work. I responded to the post and had a lively exchange in the comments, so I decided to interview Michael for a podcast.
In this podcast I talk with Michael about single sourcing, collaborative authoring, mashups, help authoring trends, and other topics. You can follow Michael’s blog at Mashstream.com.
(Note: We had a brief Skype issue at the start. The audio gets noticeably better at around the 5 minute mark. It’s actually a great example of the clarity that the double-ender recording technique provides instead of just using Skype to record.)
Read more..Podcast about the Podcast Poll
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 Posted in Podcasts | 7 Comments »
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Length: 15 min.
In this brief podcast, I discuss the results of the podcast poll that I published on my site earlier this week. I mostly wanted an opportunity to try out my new Behringer mixer/preamp, and the results of the poll served as perfect fodder for a podcast. In this 15 minutes of audio, I explain the direction that I plan to take my podcast based on the votes and feedback.
Polls, surveys, and feedback are always a good thing. They help me understand not only what my audience values, but what I value too. Thanks for participating.
A podcast about my podcast …
Podcast on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging
Thursday, November 5th, 2009 Posted in Podcasts | No Comments »
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Length: 1 hour 45 min.
Over the last month, you’ve been seeing various posts on my site about the seven deadly sins of blogging (being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, unfindable, and inattentive). I mentioned at the beginning of my seven deadly sins series that I was preparing for some upcoming presentations on blogging. I first presented on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging at WebWorks Roundup 2009. I gave a similar presentation to the STC-Suncoast chapter (in Tampa, Florida) last night. The latter one I recorded.
While the content of both presentations was supposed to be the same, that’s not how it worked out. The presentation to Suncoast kind of veers off in different directions half way through. I also decided to bookend this podcast with a few thoughts before and after the presentation while driving (hence the length).
Read more..Podcast from BYU Idaho Professional Writing Panel
Thursday, October 15th, 2009 Posted in Podcasts | No Comments »
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Length: 50 min.
Last week I was up at BYU Idaho at a writing conference for students looking to enter professional writing. This is a recording of a panel I participated on with two other writers, Scott Cameron and Keith Harten. The three of us (two technical writers and one editor) answer questions from students for about an hour. For students looking to go into technical writing, editing, or other professional writing careers, this podcast may answer a lot of questions.
Read more..Podcast on Getting a Job in Technical Writing, 7 Steps
Thursday, October 15th, 2009 Posted in Podcasts | No Comments »
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Length: 40 min.
Last week I gave a presentation to BYU Idaho students entitled 7 Steps to Getting a Job in Technical Writing. This is a recording of my presentation. You may remember a lengthy post I wrote on this same subject, 7 steps to getting a job in technical writing, as well.
Although getting a job is the focus of the podcast, I also talk about what technical writers do, how they approach a project, how they decide what to create, and how they generate ideas for tasks. Specifically, I talk about about a project people can work on at tech.lds.org. People can start writing help for the project here. (more…)
Read more..Choosing Between Academic and Corporate Life: Did I Make the Wrong Choice?
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 Posted in Creativity, Podcasts, Technical Writing | 20 Comments »
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Length: 15 min.
For the past couple of days I’ve been in Idaho at a pre-professional writing conference at Brigham Young University – Idaho. The purpose of the writing conference is to bring in published novelists, poets, editors, and professional writers to give students a glimpse into the careers they plan to enter.
This is my second year presenting to students about technical writing. You may remember my post last year about Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing, in which I tried to disabuse students of the idea that technical writing is nothing but boredom and drudgery. This year I focused on Seven Steps to Getting a Job in Technical Writing. But that’s not the focus of this post. This year the conference made me reflect on the academic life I chose not to follow and evaluate whether that choice was right.
A little background. From 2002 to 2004, I taught writing courses at The American University in Cairo (in Egypt) with about 20 other composition instructors. Among those instructors, I met Josh Allen and his wife Suzy, who quickly became our best friends in Egypt. I had so much in common with Josh – both of us were composition instructors. Both of us were Mormon (the only Mormon teachers at AUC). Both of us were married and had children about the same ages. Both of us were first-timers in Egypt. Both of us shared a love of writing, literature, and the university setting. (more…)
Read more..My STC Summit Blogging Presentation Is Free
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 Posted in Blogging, Podcasts | 6 Comments »
As you know, the sessions at the STC Summit in Atlanta last year were recorded. My blogging presentation, Introduction to Blogging: A New Technical Communicator Role, is the only recorded session you can listen to for free. It’s labeled as the “Featured session – free of charge.”
I didn’t even realize this until someone tweeted it this afternoon. I figure it means one of two things — either my presentation was so lame they couldn’t fathom actually charging for it. Or it was so cool they decided to use it to try to get people to buy the entire recorded Summit package. Either way, it’s a good hour and a half discussion of blogging. I talk about how “writing a product blog can help you connect and communicate with your users while simultaneously helping them move up to a more advanced level of product knowledge.” (more…)
Read more..Information Overload — Conversation with Ricardo Amigo
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 Posted in Podcasts | No Comments »
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Length: 55 min.
Dealing with information overload can be a huge stressor in life. Not only trying to keep up with the constant deluge of information that comes at you daily, but also managing that information in an organized way — so that you can find and implement it — can put your sanity in question. In this podcast, I talk with Ricardo Amigo, a translator in Costa Rica, about different ways to manage information overload. We cover a few of the following topics:
- Personal information management
- Keeping found things found
- Organizing by clips
- Organizing by wikis
- Other tools to deal with information overload
- Finding time to get things done
- Podcasts as a tool for keeping up
- Email jail
- Leadership in information overload
To learn more about Ricardo Amigo, see his site, Amigo Audio. Special thanks to amigo for processing the audio for this podcast.
Read more..Podcast with Anne Gentle about her Conversation and Community book
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 Posted in Podcasts, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »
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Length: 40 min.
As a follow-up to my review of Anne Gentle’s book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation
- What’s the first step in connecting with your users?
- Why are wikis used more internally than externally?
- How can you build trust with users?
- What’s the 90-9-1 percent rule and how can you change the 1 percent part?
- What three steps can you follow for any strategy with social media?
- What is “read wear” and how can you make that content more visible?
- What happens when you break the listen-participate-share-then-lead model?
- How can you use Twitter into your documentation strategy?
- What mindset is antithetical to building conversations and communities with your users?