Happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2015 with an exciting issue of Intercom. This month you will find a special section on technical and professional writing and editing fundamentals, guest edited by Marcia Riefer Johnston, a product review of MadCap Lingo 9, and an interview with Anthony Olivier, MadCap founder and CEO, about the recent acquisition of Doc-To-Help.
There are 10 articles on fundamentals this month. Six of the articles appear in print, while an additional four articles are published in Intercom online. Guest editor Marcia Riefer Johnston is a well-known technical communicator and writer who has collected some of her own essays into a popular book titled Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them). In college, she wrote one-act plays that were performed on the campus stage and studied under Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff in the Syracuse University creative-writing program. She taught technical writing in the Engineering School at Cornell University. Marcia has also written for the scholarly journal Shakespeare Quarterly, STC’s professional journal Technical Communication, and the weekly newspaper Syracuse New Times. Within STC, she has been involved in both the Central New York and the Willamette Valley Chapters.
The articles in this issue run the gamut from guidelines for writing traditional manuals to writing for translation, to writing training-video scripts, to transitioning to marketing writing marketing, writing business emails, and working as or with editors. The online articles include topics by Laura Creekmore, Danielle Villegas, Sharon Burton, and David Caruso on crafting emails, being a technical writer, loving your job, and giving conference talks to become a better communicator. I want to thank Marcia and all the authors for producing such an interesting and varied issue on writing fundamentals. An excellent start to a new year in technical communication!
—Liz Pohland
