iA Writer for iPhone. My favorite writing application on the Mac is now live on the iPhone. It includes support for iCloud and Dropbox. I would love to pay them more than $0.99 for such a wonderful piece of software.
Tag: writing
Writing beginner level tutorials. Great tips about what to consider when writing tutorials aimed at beginners. My favorite nugget is, “[people looking for help] won’t be searching for the solution – they’ll be searching on keywords relating to the problem.” (via Daniel Bachhuber)
Deploy. An essay by Mandy Brown that asks how we can more effectively create living texts.
On Content: less is more. Sean Blanda nails it here. Great set of guidelines for any writer to aspire to. I wish more publications understood and followed these ideas.
Avoiding easy
When you spend all day working with the same piece of software your definition of what is easy for someone else becomes horribly skewed. Since I started jamming with the CoPress gang in 2009, I have spent thousands of hours staring at a WordPress dashboard. It means much of the WordPress interface is easy for me. That’s dangerous.
I try to minimize the number of times I use easy in a support reply. I avoid phrases like “Setting up custom menus is easy…” or “Writing a new post is easy…” There are a few reasons for this.
First, if a feature or product were legitimately easy the user would not be writing in to support about how stuck they are. Sure, some percentage of users will find questions to ask about any interface. But do you want to start the conversation by assuming the user falls into that percentage? You venture to learn much more if you assume the software is wrong, not the user.
Second, describing something as easy sets a dangerously high bar for the user when they walk away and try it for themselves. Before you characterize a feature as easy you should be certain it actually is. If you say “easy” and the user does not get it they will, at best, feel like they are wasting your time and, at worst, feel like it is not worth using your product.
Finally, the worst part about saying a product is easy is that it immediately starts the conversation by putting you in command. You are the expert. You are the one who said it was easy. In some cases that is okay. It will work out. But doing so shuts down your opportunity for learning from your users. If, instead, you think back to the days when you did not know everything, you can start the conversation on an equal ground. Help the user accomplish their goal but also learn about where the pain points are so that you can make the user’s experience, and your product, better.
The best support is a conversation. The best support happens when a user learns how to do something new and you learn about how your product can be better. This can only happen when you do not immediately think of your software as easy, intuitive, or simple. If you can remember that you too were once new to things you will end up with a better product and, most importantly, happier users.
Status
The first 80% of a blog post writes itself. The rest? It’s like pulling teeth sometimes.
Blogs, term papers, and a fear of what’s new
Cody Brown tweeted a link to this New York Times article earlier today about blogs and term papers. It’s a fairly shallow piece with many things I’d enjoy responding to, but I’ll pick one: the patronizing way the old guard portrays newer forms of writing.
Here are two quotes from that article. The first is from Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal:
It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.
The second is from William H. Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review:
Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.
Fitzhugh and Reeves aren’t engaging with the idea of blogs from an academic or evidence-based perspective. They seem to fearful of the new medium and seek to discredit it with all the tact of a gossip writer.
“We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives” is a great soundbite, but it is ridiculous. First, are we so sure there is something wrong with giving kids an outlet to write about themselves and their home life? Second, what does it matter what the output is if the learning that happens in the process of getting there is substantial? I think Fitzhugh and Reeves are far too concerned with the potential output of these blogs than they are with what kids may learn by writing in a medium they enjoy.
If you want to say that blogs have, through research, been the cause of decreasing critical thinking among students that is fine. Merely asserting it does not make it so, though. You need evidence to back your claims, just like the term papers Reeves and Fitzhugh glorify.
If, instead, you are going to characterize the only benefit of blogs as the fact that some are “interesting” and imply that “premise, evidence, argument and conclusion” are only achieved through dead tree term papers, then you are full of it.
These two would be better off taking Reeves’ advice and using premise, evidence, argument, and conclusion to analyze writing on the web.
The Value of Content, Part 1: Adam Smith never expected this. Melissa Rach takes a look at how content on the web defies traditional models of economics. In part 2 she explains the basics of effectively communicating the value of content. Sections 2 and 3 of Part 2 are particularly good. Part 2 is here.
Publish for people, not to them
Part of the job of a publisher today is to facilitate discussion—and that means being a part of it. It means that we publish for people, not to them.
Mandy Brown – Babies and the Bathwater.
Contents Magazine. Though it began last month, I have recently been enjoying the first issue of Contents Magazine. If you work on the web and have an interest in well-crafted writing it’s worth checking out. The Business of Content is particularly good.