Key Concept Archive

For more information about how our library science background (and our love of all things metadata) guides the way we catalog information, see the Techcomm and Arbortext Resources page.

Work Yourself out of Your Job (And Advance Your Career in the Process)

In this TC Dojo… Have you ever felt like your workday is consumed by chores? Have you ever considered taking a vacation day so that you can get some real work done? You're not alone. Most of us inherit a…

Using Style Guides to Achieve Content Collaboration and Consistency

Style Guides: What Goes In Them and What Can They Cover? Style guides serve an important role, establishing guidelines to improve communication, ensure consistency, and enforce best practices in composition, presentation, and language, and representing the specific needs of the…

Using Checklists to Increase Consistency and Productivity in Communications Tasks

Anyone writing, editing, or managing any type of communications for a living is feeling the crunch. There is less time to create and edit; more types and formats of content; more apps, software, and systems to learn. And we expect…

Building a Style Guide from the Ground Up

How do you establish a style guide, and how do you keep it going? In this session, I’ll talk about my experience implementing and maintaining a corporate style guide. What started as a casual department guide for 25 tech writers…

Add Super Power to Your Communication with Super Structures

Super structures can increase performance and boost your productivity. They take advantage of economies of scale in your routine communication without causing you to succumb to numbing uniformity. Say what?! Super structures are logic flows that help you evaluate and…

Writing (Non-Agile) Business Requirements

Writing requirements requires the ability to write clearly, concisely, and succinctly so others can design, develop, and test the product. This session covers 8 characteristics of writing a good requirement, reviews 4 steps to requirements gathering, and concludes with 17…

Collaboration – Love it or Hate it?

This month I wanted to find out if you have come to love or hate collaboration in any of it's forms.  I'm a big experimenter which often means I'm a big collaborator. In January's TC Dojo, we had Karl Klashinsky…

What You Need to Know about Agile and Techcomm

When working in an agile environment, technical writers can face some challenges in planning, workload balancing, and execution. But writers can realize numerous benefits in this environment if they follow a few principles to stay flexible and fully engaged on…