Rahul Prabhakar  - when the muse strikes!

Wow, this is a really well-written Blog. It is about Technical Communications and of course it would be well-written. I really liked the job he did in one of his articles, Top 10 Challenges Faced By Technical Communicators at Work, where he wrote about the problems associated with the tech writing field. He polled a group of technical writers and netted out the biggest problems that working tech writers face.

One of the main themes in that article was about getting to the core of what has to be written. I have a couple of tools I use to reduce down to the core elements of something. One is the LAB Profile. This is a linguistic model I developed in the late 70s and early 80s to understand communications (and the people doing the communicating) on a range of 40 scales. I also use it to understand who my audience is.

The other is the Cube (no site for this one, yet). Basically, I view every task-project-situation from six different frames-of-reference. Content, context, structure, flow, overview, & measurement. When I’m gathering information or organizing an intervention, I need to make sure that I have addressed all of these aspects. If I’m clear on all of these, I’m sure I’ve covered all the bases.

I really like this Blog. And I highly recommend it for its clarity.