My commitment to writing traces back to the moment I discovered “The Hemingway Reader.” It’s one of the books I’d grab if our house were on fire. The observations and excerpts in Charles Poore’s foreword have shaped my writing efforts in journalism, playwriting, fiction, poetry, technical writing, marketing writing—every kind of writing I’ve ever done. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Technical communication
Yes, You Can Jump-start a Car with a Prius: A Technical-Communication Hero Story
How often does a technical communicator get to be the hero? I got my chance recently. Well, the real hero is a mindset that I share with all technical communicators. Here’s what happened. Continue reading
Tom Johnson Interviews Marcia at the Intelligent Content Conference
Blogger and technical communicator Tom Johnson interviews Marcia on the importance of writing skills in today’s techno-savvy world.
Maxwell Hoffmann Reviews Word Up! for the Society for Technical Communication
Maxwell Hoffman: “Although I’ve written this review with technical communicators in mind, Word Up! is an ideal … guide for anyone who does any type of writing.”
Technical Communicators, Did You Feel the Wave?
This website has had a record 368 page views so far today, and it’s not even 4 pm. The page that drew most of that attention? “You Know You’re a Technical Communicator When…”
Parallelism: Give Your Writing a Left Edge
If you can make a grocery list, you can master parallelism.
“The Language of Content Strategy”—Now Available
Curious about content strategy? Get Scott Abel and Rahel Anne Bailie’s book, The Language of Content Strategy, for which I wrote the foreword and to which over fifty content strategists contributed. This book defines terms like content audit, adaptive content, content engineering, content model, and intelligent content. Beyond defining content strategy, this book exemplifies it…
A Story for Technical Writers
Hey, tech writers. Adobe published a story today that you might appreciate. It’s my story of using their FrameMaker software to save one of my clients $16,000 and cut six weeks off a project’s translation schedule by single sourcing two user guides.
Say One Thing
According to the bestselling book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, if you want your message to stick, you must first figure out the one thing you want to say. Then, say that one thing.
Interview by The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel
Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler, interviews Marcia Riefer Johnston about her upcoming book Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them) in the latest issue of the Society for Technical Communication magazine, Intercom.