OVERVIEW A good User Document includes sections on how to set up, use, and care for the product. However, to create a great User Document , the technical writer should use the Persona, generated in the analysis of the User/Reader, to create the topics for the most useful section of the User Document. This article describes this procedure. THE MOST USEFUL SECTION OF A USER DOCUMENT The most useful section of a User Document is the one that helps the User get what he...

From scrapbooking to videography, so many families around the world are trying to document their life history before they depart from this world. But what happens when one becomes frustrated with it all, not enough time and/or money, started a project but never finished it or better yet never even began? Online experts have provided many solutions to this problem, two websites can be found at the end of this article. Let's begin with some tips from a work in progress to co...

When conducting due diligence research work, part of the process is free online searches for criminal records. You will be amazed to know how much you can learn through the Internet alone. A diverse medium, the Internet offers several web portals to tons of public record information which can help you with your free online searches for criminal records. Below are some of these websites, along with brief descriptions of the type of information they contain. Just one more th...

OVERVIEW People are visual creatures. They look at your product, and see, for example, a button or display. They want to find out about that control or indicator. A Visual Index is a simple but powerful document access tool that enables your Readers to find the information that they want. This article describes the Visual Index concept and tells how to create one for your document. A VISUAL INDEX A Visual Index is a picture of your product or process with links to...

What's even funnier is that the food at those places isn't even great, but I keep thinking I must be missing something since so many other people like it!

Self-publishing has become common practice for many writers who want accolades of having a book published, no matter who publishes it. Writers choose self-publishing for various reasons. Many writers desire the freedom and business aspects of publishing work independently. A self-published writer is one who is in control of every aspect of their published work. The publishing industry defines self-publishing as authors publishing their own books or other media, instead of wit...

The issue of global warming is gaining wide acceptance with more and more countries making the endeavor to delay the catastrophic effects of this phenomenon. Today, scientists and environmentalists are offering people, across the world, alternatives that can be used in their everyday life.

There's a television commercial, I believe it's for E-trade, that talks about how nobody wants to be an ordinary...fill in the blank. Supposedly we aspire to be better. Nobody wants to be an ordinary athlete, nobody wants to be an ordinary investor. A photo of Hemingway flashes across the screen and it says "nobody wants to be an ordinary writer". That made me pause. I wasn't so sure about that. You see, I am struck by how often I hear from writers who want to know if thei...

After the pomp and circumstance is over and you have opened the last wedding gift it soon comes time to face the daunting task of writing your thank you notes. If you are anything like me the thought of sitting down to a stack of cards makes me find every excuse in the book not to do them. The key to writing your thank you notes is preparation and organization. In fact with the right preparation writing thank you notes can be simply painless. The following are some suggestion...