Wednesday

Mentor a New Technical Writer

Today I work with Crystal on her documentation project. We review the first review edits from the context experts and talk about how to resolve them. At first review, we typically focus on organization, technical correctness, and usability. We work on grammar and style guide issues in later reviews.

Give a Brown Bag Presentation

I have been working on a presentation with Neerja, a technical writer in another group, for the other technical writers at NI. Our presentation is about new changes to our recruiting process, and we present it today in a "brown bag" session. We call it a brown bag presentation because we present over the lunch hour and invite all technical writers to bring their lunch and learn more about the topic. Brown bag topics vary from new tools, technologies, and skills that make us better technical writers to personal interests, such as jewelry making and photography. In addition to covering the changes in our recruiting process, this presentation is a great opportunity for other technical writers to get involved with recruiting.

Discuss the NI Style Guide

Later in the day, I meet with the NI Style Guide committee to discuss a possible change in our in-house style guide. The NI Style Guide helps writers to maintain a consistent writing style across NI documents, including using the same abbreviations across products and using the same phrasing for standard text. At this meeting, we discuss adding new acronyms to our list of common knowledge acronyms. This list determines which acronyms do not have to be spelled out at first use in our documentation. After the meeting, I search my documentation set to ensure that I am correctly using the newly added acronyms.