In this episode, a truly great and fun conversation with prolific and influential technical writer Tom Johnson. Tom joins us from Silicon Valley to talk about his interesting path to technical communication, failed Career Day booths, being a leader in techcomm, content management systems, DITA, static site generators, and much more.
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Mentioned during the show:
Tom’s web site – I’d rather be writing
Tom on Twitter
Tom’s review of our podcast
Why no one stopped by my technical writing booth at career fair day
Tom on finding time to write
Jekyll static site generator
Liquid templating language
Confluence wiki
Adobe RoboHelp
Madcap Flare
oXygen XML Editor
Protopage RSS feed aggregator
Inoreader RSS feed aggregator
Feedly RSS feed aggregator
Salesforce Knowledge
DITA module for Drupal CMS (in development)
Karen McGrane on “blobs”
Markdown formatting syntax language
DocPad text editor
WebStorm text editor
GitHub
Blubrry podcasting plugin for WordPress
contentcontent.info
Ed Marsh on Twitter
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08:29 — 94.1MB)
I wrote a review of Steven Pinker’s Sense of Style for IEEE Micro, but I haven’t posted it on my own blog yet. He goes into the curse of knowledge, which he summarizes as: “The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.”
Interesting, thanks for sharing that Richard! I look forward to reading the blog post.
Ed.