We all want to do a good job. Some of us also want to get better at our craft for a number of reasons, either practical or slightly delusional. Those include getting a raise, strengthening our résume, or simply ending the day with a fragile feeling of satisfaction after surviving failure for the nth time. They’re all good goals, though the ways of achieving them are not always straightforward. Moreover, the path to career growth is riddled with self-doubt and impostor syndrome.| passo.uno
In what is tantamount to a vulgar display of power, social media has been flooded with AI-generated images that mimic the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime. Something similar happens daily with tech writing, folks happily throwing context at LLMs and thinking they can vibe write outstanding docs out of them, perhaps even surpassing human writers. Well, it’s time to draw a line. Don’t let AI influencers studioghiblify your work as if it were a matter of processing text.| passo.uno
Demoralized by the advent of LLMs, I see tech writing communities break ranks and flee. In a world where coders who write seem to muster more respect than writers who code, the response from tech writers to the challenges posed by the intersection of automation, multichannel delivery, and docs-as-code is weak, if not absent. Conferences and blogs mostly focus on soothing anxiety and perfecting praxis. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that it’s an intellectual dead end.| passo.uno
Everybody loves to hate Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs. More often than not, technical writers pale and stagger at the sight of hefty, unsorted FAQs, as if they were beholding a writhing mass of primal chaos. Others value their pragmatic qualities: FAQs, they say, lower the bar to contribution and are good fuel for LLMs and search engines. My opinion is that FAQs pose a problem only when there’s no strategy around their usage.| passo.uno
I’ve been wondering for a while why I don’t see more blogs on technical writing, tech comms, and technical documentation. I’ve been in listening mode for years, and beyond Tom Johnson’s excellent blog, it’s hard to find more content around technical writing. I’ve some hypotheses as to why that’s happening, as well as a request: We should be blogging more about technical writing and tech comms.| passo.uno