Hobbies and pastimes of technical writers everywhere

Hallo fellow techcomm folks! Do you have a hobby?

Mine is fairly pedestrian. I like to go walking in the bush. It blows away the cobwebs. Well, actually, I often have to blow away the cobwebs myself. They festoon the pathways in the early morning. It’s best to keep your mouth closed when strolling in the Australian bush, or you’ll find yourself spitting spiders.

Sometimes a bird pops out and does something interesting, and I blog about it.

Of a dark winter’s eve I can perchance be found tickling the ivories. Perhaps significantly, other members of the household are usually to be found in the furthest corners of the house.

So fess up

What do you get up to when the pleasures of the pen pall? (Aside from avoiding sentences like that.)

• David Farbey bakes bread.
• Rhonda Bracey quilts. Magnificently.
• Tom Johnson blogs.

For years I had a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon pasted above my desk. It showed Calvin’s father with a mangled bicycle, obviously the result of a bad stack. The caption read: “The secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that’s even worse.”

Horse meetup found in technical writer’s blog post

;)

Rewarding humour in online help forums

One of the contributors in our online question-and-answer forum, Daniel Stevens, has a quirky and amusing style of writing. His entries are always relevant, but he nevertheless manages to inject some humour that makes for easy reading and invites quick responses from other forum users.

My first aim in writing this post was to share the fun of reading Daniel’s forum entries. Then I thought about the bigger picture. The idea of humour in an online help forum is an interesting phenomenon, especially for technical communicators.

First, the fun. Here’s a screenshot of one of Daniel’s posts, called Is there a flood control function on the “Like” button?

And here’s another, Why can’t I upload icons for new priority, issue and workflow step entries?

Have you encountered similar witty posts in user forums? What do you think about the idea of rewarding such entries? This particular forum, Atlassian Answers, is clever about awarding badges and points for popular questions and good answers. Each contributor to the forum builds up a “karma score”, which encourages people to keep contributing. So, should there be a specific score category for funny entries?

As one of my colleagues pointed out, the social review site Yelp invites readers to click a button saying whether a review is “useful”, “funny”, or “cool”. Should a user forum do the same?

If the forum starts rewarding humour entries, might that lead to irrelevant and silly content? My opinion is that there may be some of that, but on the whole people are in the forum to get a question answered, or to help other people with their questions. A touch of humour just makes the posts flow better, and most people will recognise that fact. People who don’t have a bent for humour won’t bother to spend the time trying to be funny. Or is that a naive assumption? :)

Outcasts make good – semicolon, hyphen and parenthesis unite

A thought struck me in the shower this morning. I laughed out loud. Perhaps only a technical writer would. ;)

The semicolon, hyphen and parenthesis. They’re the pariahs of our world. Yet they’ve got together and created a new semantic symbol. ; -)

Content management LOL

Ready for a Friday chuckle?

I took this picture in a stairwell, then tweeted it:

This has to be an important document! 

Content management LOL

Here’s the reply I received from Alan J. Porter:

I think that may be taking content management a little too far!!

While Michael O’Neill quips:

Can’t tell if it’s a usability fail or win. ;P

LOL (laugh out loud)! :)