Let's Tech Communicate
October 2017
Earnsy Liu’s scholarly Where’s the Evidence series is so enjoyable and thought-provoking that for this month’s Let’s Tech Communicate I offer you some reading with a clear academic focus.
Olivia Duffus from Cedarville University gives us Feminist Theory and Technical Communication. Geoff Hart’s Effective Infographics is a well-ordered, well-argued, intellectual and completely joke-free exposition of the infographic. Anybody tempted by the extravagant pay packets of API documentors will want to devour Creating an API Documentation Portal…by Ellis Pratt (his real name). Ellis’s Can We Quit QWERTY from the ISTC Communicator magazine is far more detailed and interesting than it ought to be. Finally, there is something for all punctuation historians and completists. I offer you a delightful History of Tiny Hands in the Margins.
Feminist Theory and Technical Communication
Olivia Duffus explores feminism, socially-constructed norms, and the relationship between feminism and technical communication. She argues that undergraduate technical communication programs should include courses that study feminist history and theories as related to the field, claiming that studying feminist theory will improve user-centred design and broaden students' spheres of influence as professionals.
Effective Infographics : Telling Stories in the Technical Communication Context
Geoff Hart is a man after my own heart. He opens his essay with “The word infographic is a portmanteau created by jamming together two words: information that you want to convey in a graphic form.” His article is a scholarly investigation into all aspects of the infographic with examples. He even finds a reason to discuss aspects of Aristotle’s rhetoric.
Creating an API Documentation Portal with MadCap Flare and Swagger/OpenAPI
Ellis Pratt writes the Cherryleaf blog. Here he looks at whether automatically generated REST API reference documentation can be combined with Flare, to create a web site that gives users a coherent and comprehensive user experience. There is also a useful link to MadCap Software’s The Definitive Guide to Creating API Documentation.
I found this one in the back issues of Communicator, the magazine for The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators. In it Ellis Pratt (again) takes a meandering yet educated and interesting look at replacing the 127 year old keyboard layout designed to limit the number of key jams on a mechanical typewriter. As I said in the introduction, this article is far more detailed and interesting than it ought to be.
God bless Anika Burgess for rescuing the manicule from obscurity and God bless Emma Harding for pointing it out to me. For centuries, readers annotated books with tiny drawings of hands. This was the medieval equivalent of the highlighter. Used on the Domesday Book of 1066, they became really popular in renaissance Europe. There is even a manicule in the Wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth following his assassination of President Lincoln. It gestured towards the reward announcement. There are still manicules on modern tombstones and where do they point? To Heaven of course.
Grant Mackenzie
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