An undocumented RoboHelp feature?
My thanks to RoboHelp guru Peter Grainge for sending me the results of a Google alert he received today. Cue lots of jokes about follicles and software patches (or as Peter put it) “thatches”. LOL! Read more 
A joke for grammar pedants everywhere
We we approach the end of the week and the release deadline gets every closer, maybe I’d be forgiven for bringing you all some joy and laughter. So to tide you over until you are able to reach out for that glass of wine / pitcher of beer / gin and tonic (delete as necessary) let me do just that.
Clairvoyance : A second career for Technical Communicators?
Technical Writers in the UK will know that they will have to complete a census on 27th March. This rather quaint but mildly pointless exercise has been sent to every UK household with instructions to answer various questions on the day in question.
Two of the questions being asked are causing a few of my fellow professionals some difficulty. The first, “What is your job title?”, is easy enough but when it is followed by, “Describe briefly what you do?” things start to become more difficult. The usual answers such as “Write manuals” have been banded around but my favorite answers so far have been:
- “Making the complex simple.”
- “Implementing simplicity around complexity.”
- “Designing structure around chaos.”
One contributor said her young daughter was so confused when asked at school what her Mother did that she responded, “She’s a waitress.” Personally I hope I’ll have the courage to put down the following as suggested by a fellow wit, “I don’t know. I’m not a clairvoyant!”
Friday Fun: Cricket for Dummies
A recent LinkedIn discussion I read talked about whether we would post something online without performing a thorough proof read, grammar /spell check. The premise was that as professionals we should never post anything that put our profession in a bad light. The discussion went on to discuss whether there were any exceptions to this (e.g. comments on forums / blogs, Twitter, etc.). I thought there were.
Then today a brief online discussion I had with some friends turned to sports whose rule books could be rewritten by a Technical Communicator. For me, Cricket was the obvious first choice. This prompted the following from my good friend Peter Grainge:
“The rules of cricket are easy. You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in, goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game. Simple!”
I rest my case 
