The objective of a disaster recovery (DR) plan is to ensure that an organization can respond to a disaster or other emergency that affects information systems – and minimize the effect on business operations. Below is a sample template to produce a basic disaster recovery plan. The following are the suggested steps as found in the DR template. … Read more
1. Know your audience Written communications are most effective when they are targeted and personal. Build your writing around the needs and interests of the user of your technology product. Most technical documents – blog articles, white papers, manuals, reports, brochures are written for many readers, not just an individual. You may not know the … Read more
A technical white paper is a document that describes how a technology or product solves a particular problem. A good white paper is informative and is written to give readers an idea about the advantages of a product or technology. Writing a whitepaper requires deep understanding of a product’s technology as well as its application … Read more
In my initial days of working as a technical writer, I was advised not to include screenshots of the proprietary software anywhere in documentation. The rationale was that the images could land into wrong hands and competitors would be able to scoop up the features we were adding to the software. That was 2004. Today, practically … Read more
Making a request to one documentation topic often requires the technical writer to adjust other topics as well. Simple Example: When a new feature is added to a software product, there may be multiple guides that need to be updated. First document needing updating could be the product’s user-manual. Second document could be release notes. Both these … Read more
“The fundamental purpose of scientific discourse is not the mere presentation of information and thought but rather its actual communication. It does not matter how pleased an author might be to have converted all the right data into sentences and paragraphs; it matters only whether a large majority of the reading audience accurately perceives what … Read more