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Matthew Ellison runs his own UK-based training and consulting company, specializing in user assistance design and technology. He coordinates the annual UA Europe Conference and is himself a popular speaker at conferences and training events around the world. He also regularly publishes articles and reviews on user assistance.

In this edition of the ITauthor Podcast I talk to Matthew about the UA Europe Conference.

We discuss:

• the number of countries from which delegates attend the conference
• what it’s like being the organiser of a large conference for technical communicators
• how can delegates justify the budget to attend the UA conference in these difficult economic times
• the sessions and speakers we can look forward to at this year's conference
• the No.1 issue affecting technical writers today
• trends or changes technical writers ought to be aware of
• what keeps Matthew busy when he’s not organising and running the UA Europe Conference

Talking about the “good enough” philosophy for user assistance, Matthew says:

"There's a fine line between doing documentation that's good enough and not being professional, and I certainly would never want to put something in front of a user that I didn't consider a professional piece of work."

Find out all about the UA Europe Conference at: http://www.uaconference.eu.

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.

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The voices in this podcast belong to: Graham Campbell and Alistair Christie.

This time round – recorded over Skype – Graham and I discuss:

• “technical author”, “technical writer” or “technical communicator”
• being forced out of technical writing by personal economics
• why contractors are more productive than permanent documentation staff
• an occasion where the tech writer was the closest thing to a Subject Matter Expert in an application development team
• tech writers being considered “the lowest of the low”
• why management find tech writers the easiest people to “let go”
• using voiceovers rather than written callouts in videos
• is documentation sometimes really remedial work on a bad user interface?
• what do we actually need to document in an online help system?
• being proud of the work we do

StoryCorps recording in this podcast

This episode of the podcast ends with a StoryCorps recording of Ed Miller talking to his son EJ. This audio was provided courtesy of StoryCorps. Please visit www.storycorps.org for more details and, if you like what they do, please consider making a donation to help keep the StoryCorps mobile units on the road.

The part of this recording that I really identified with was where he says:

We go to the mall nowadays, me and Mom, and I see dads walking with their sons or daughters, holding their hands, and I tell you, my heart aches for the days when I used to do that …

Podcast recommendations:

The Writing Show  –  http://www.writingshow.com/index.html 

(Graham refers to the recording I made for the Writing Show.)

The StoryCorps Podcast – http://www.storycorps.org/listen/podcast

Application recommendations:

Skype – http://www.skype.com

Techsmith Snagit – http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp 

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The voices in this podcast belong to: Graham Campbell and Alistair Christie.

This time round – recorded over Skype – Graham and I discuss:

• Migrating online help projects from RoboHelp to Madcap Flare
• How I use twitter and why Graham doesn’t
• Integration of social media – for example, information flowing from your blog to twitter to Facebook
• The death of blogging?
• Hard times for ITauthor’s stats
• Geoff Pullum, Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band 

This is the photo I mentioned of Geoff Pullum (who was calling himself Jeff Wright – bottom left) with Geno Washington and other members of the Ram Jam Band.

I hadn’t realised, until scouting around the internet to find this picture, that Geno Washington and The Ram Jam Band had two of the biggest selling UK albums of the sixties. Hand Clappin, Foot Stompin, Funky Butt Live was in the album charts for 48 weeks during 1966 and was only out-sold by The Sound of Music and Bridge over Troubled Water.

Podcast recommendations:

Adam and Joe – http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/adamandjoe/

Great Lives – http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/greatlives/

Application recommendations:

WebEx iPhone application – http://www.webex.com/iphone/

Freemind – http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page 

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Professor Geoffrey Pullum, Professor of Linguistics at University of Edinburgh, recently wrote an article called ‘50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice’ in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Strunk and White’s Element of Style.

I visited Professor Pullum in his office in a beautiful new university building in the heart of Edinburgh to talk to him about his article and to discuss grammar and technical writing.

Among other things, we talk about:

• the split infinitive
• “none of us are” or “none of us is”?
• that and which
• the view of grammar as commandments brought down from the Grammar Mountain
• the pressure to enforce grammar rules, even when you don’t believe them
• why do most of us know so little about grammar?
• if we shouldn’t use Strunk & White, where should we go for grammar advice?
• nerdview

We also mentioned Professor Pullum’s talk at last year’s UA Conference Europe:
The Piranha Brothers, the Unwritten Grammatical Law, and the Phenomenon of Nerdview,
which is well worth reading if you find this interview interesting.

Related recordings:

• Professor Pullum on NPR’s Talk of the Nation phone-in, April 16, 2009
• Professor Pullum interviewed on NPR's Here and Now show from September 2006
• Marc Acito marks to 50th anniversary of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style on NPR, April 2006

Related blog posts:

• Happy Birthday, Strunk and White! – from the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog
• Pullum on Strunk and White from Orange Crate Art
• Hardly [adverb] convincing [adjective] from Orange Crate Art
• The End of Strunk from SLOG

Other links:

• Geoff Pullum’s Home Page
• Language Log

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I thought about calling this “the heavy breathing episode” because there’s a lot of puffing and panting in this recording: the puffing from me, the panting from my Italian Spinone, Lottie, as she sprints and I plod up the Pentland hills a few miles from where I live in Edinburgh.

In this podcast I talk about:

• My decision to try commenting on other people’s blogs
• Using twitter
• Trying to get more done

One aspect of getting more done is trying to use my time more productively. So, to that end, I thought I’d use some dog walking time to record this podcast.

I suspect some (or all?) of you may find the rambling nature of this recording tedious, but hopefully you’ll enjoy the birdsong! Let me know what you think by dropping me a comment. If no one likes this style of on-the-hoof recording I’ll stick to the indoor type in future.

The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.