The Art of Documentation

Writers are often tasked with writing persuasive essays or articles for their clients.  In persuasive writing, a writer’s goal is essentially to convince the audience to agree with the writer’s position about an issue. In many cases persuasive arguments are used to motivate the audience to not only agree, but to do something; take action, [...]

As a visual writer, finding the right image to use is always important. Because there are a ton of photographers and graphic artists that generously upload photos for free and fair use using Creative Commons licenses, there is a lot of material out there.  But it can be difficult to sort through free and licensed [...]

One of the first steps in researching and writing about a topic should be to identify the audience and the purpose of your message.

If DocumentCloud lives up to its promise, this could be a massive paradigm shift for researchers and journalists.
From the Calais Blog:
The DocumentCloud initiative – winner of this year’s largest grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – has lined up some two dozen partners, everyone from Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal [...]

Users have gotten a bad rap. It’s often assumed by developers that if they do a good job coding a project, then users should just be able to use the software without any assistance. When users fail to use the software (or hardware) as designed, developers throw up their hands and mutter about the stupidity of users.