Tag: Ellis Pratt

Nov 17

Letter from the UK: Locali(s/z)ing for English

The strict “Street, City, State, Zip code” format doesn’t always translate well overseas. In the UK, we have a unique postcode for roughly every 20 houses, so you only need a customer’s postcode and house number to be able to pinpoint their location. We don’t have States and not everyone lives in a city. This means the format of people’s addresses can vary, but not cause problems for the postman. If you force the user to follow the US format, or use the US format in your examples, they might struggle to know what to enter.

Nov 06

Letter from the UK: Lessons from The Information Age exhibition

On the 24th October, The Queen opened a new gallery at The Science Museum, called “The Information Age”. The Information Age gallery takes visitors on a journey through the history of modern communications, from the telegraph to the smartphone. Exhibits on show include the broadcast equipment behind the BBC’s first radio programme in 1922, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, which hosted the first website

Oct 07

Letter from the UK: Documentation In a Personalised World

On the 9th September 2014, Apple announced a range of health-based wearable devices that will help capture biometric data. According to The Guardian, the software will allow developers to build bespoke health apps for a broad range of medical needs. This, the newspaper states, is part of a trend to make healthcare more personalised.

Aug 06

Letter from the UK: Writing Manuals for Paul Revere

One of the things we have a lot of, here in the UK, is recorded history. Over the weekend, I discovered our family is directly related to Henry Copland (1706-1754). Henry was an engraver and rococo designer of furniture, and, it turns out, he was also the co-author of a book called A New Book of Ornaments. This book was a manual for other engravers and furniture designers, such as Paul Revere, on how to create items in the Rococo style.

Jul 11

Letter from the UK: User Documentation as a Marketing Tool

Life would be so much easier for technical communicators if user documentation wasn’t seen as expense, and, instead was seen as a way to generate income for the organisation. So I was very interested when I heard Michael Priestley, enterprise content technology strategist and lead DITA architect at IBM, mention the value of user documentation as a sales tool in his presentation at the Congility 2014 conference.

May 15

Letter from the UK: Mapping Technical Communicators

Sarah Maddox will be soon speaking at the STC Summit on API Technical Writing: What, Why, and How. She recently posted an article on her blog on how she has used APIs to create an interactive map showing technical communication events around the world. This in turn prompted me to look at whether I could create a map showing the location of Technical Authors around the UK. You can see the map here: Cherryleaf Survey—Location of Technical Authors map.