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Tag: resources

Getting Down and Dirty with Accessibility and Usability – #TCUK12 Workshop

These are the notes from my workshop on 2 October 2012 at the Technical Communication UK (TCUK) 2012 conference. I called it “Getting Down and Dirty with Accessibility and Usability”. Unlike the slides for my keynote presentation at the same conference, the slides in this workshop were text heavy. (Slides are at the bottom of this post.) They were meant as notes – talking points – for the workshop. Each slide covers areas where technical communicators can begin to apply accessibility and usability right away. The workshop was called hands-on, but I ended up talking for most of the session because many attended out of curiosity and had no actual projects for hands-on practice. There were many great discussions and questions and answers during the 2.5 hours of the workshop. (If any my TCUK12 workshop attendees come to TCUK13 and want to discuss accessibility “hands-on”, we can always hack in…

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Styling your writing

I still subscribe to newsletters, and one in particular that I enjoy is the one from the Chicago Manual of Style team. The newsletter permits you to forward and repost the message, so I will do so here. The newsletter is mostly a list of the most recent questions submitted to the team. Many of the questions are quite useful, but it is the answers that are sometimes quite delightful. Obviously some clever people there! Here are this month’s questions: The Chicago Manual of Style Web site has just been updated with answers to the following new questions: Q. I am having a dispute with a local store regarding the wording of their return policy. Q. Is footnote numbering allowed in an index along with a page number? Q. I’m trying to find a definitive answer to whether an inanimate object can take the possessive form. Q. Does the following…

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Copyediting tips

After sharing this tip with two people in two days, I realized it’s time to share this tip on the blog. For all your copyediting needs, join the Copyediting-L discussion list. This great list can help you out of struggles with convoluted sentences, elusive words, ghastly syntax, and so on. For the writer struggling alone (truly alone, or with no other grammar help in sight), this group becomes the helpful colleagues who are only an email away. There is a high volume of mail, so you might want to consider subscribing to a digest format or no mails at all. All mails are archived on a Web site where you can browse to your heart’s content after you are signed up to the group. There are various rules and guidelines, but I find them to be very sensible. Before you begin, read through the information about the list, as well…

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