Practitioners find it difficult to see how the knowledge academics produce can be used to address real, practitioner-related problems. Why?

It goes deeper than academics failing to communicate with practitioners. The reason has to do with the fact that much of the academic research itself is weakly linked to the practical problems practitioners face. This fact is what makes practitioners uninterested in talking to academics— hence the gap.

Read more to find out how the gap could be bridged.

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Are you struggling with information architecture itself: What type of information should be organized, and in which manual? In the summer 2015 edition of ISTC Communicator, I present an approach to help you settle the struggle. Based on a viewpoint that users search for answers, I offer tips on how to design for findability.

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As a technical communicator, you probably know why you write manuals. It’s because you want to satisfy the user’s information need. But how do you know what information users need?

Your answer will differ depending on how you define an “information need,”  which is a central concept in the world of technical communication. The purpose of this article is to distinguish between two conflicting definitions of an information need, and to show how each perspective represented affects the design of end user assistance. 

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It’s not difficult to find information— just open a user manual or search on Google. What users find difficult, is assessing whether the found information is relevant. Learn how to better support users in making accurate relevance judgments by designing your content for enhanced findability.

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This article discusses why links are important, and how technical communicators can make them without actually explicitly writing them.

The technical communication community has come to the agreement that creating a link strategy, and the actual links, is a time consuming affair.

In this article I show how links can be generated from content classification (that is, lists of metadata —taxonomies — used to classify content). 

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