• Get Better at Using Prompts With Deliberate Practice: One technical writer's little experiment — guest post by Diana Cheung

    Updated: 2024-04-23 07:00:00
    In this guest post, Diana Cheung explores how to learn AI by using deliberate practice to enhance her prompting skills. As a deliberate practice effort, she emphasizes intentional, systematic practice rather than mindless repetition, similar to how one would learn coding or other skills. In this post, she shares her attempts at using Claude.ai to work through editorial improvements to a GitHub project's API documentation.

  • Prompt engineering series: Creating scripts to automate doc build processes

    Updated: 2024-04-21 07:00:00
    Documentation scripts perform processes such as building reference documentation or doing other repeated processes with docs. This tutorial builds on the conceptual content in Use cases for AI: Develop build and publishing scripts. In this tutorial, I get more specific with strategies and techniques for prompts, walking through a prompt to build a script for generating reference docs.

  • Voting is still ongoing for the Lindenbaum competition

    Updated: 2024-04-14 09:33:00
    : Lloyd of Gamebooks A blog about writing gamebooks . My musings on how to write a gamebook and what makes a good gamebook . Create your story here Sunday , April 14, 2024 Voting is still ongoing for the Lindenbaum competition Hello everyone Here is a reminder that voting is still going on for the Lindenbaum competition . Voting closes on the 30th April at 5pm BST GMT Whatever time it is in the UK Votes need to be sent to lindenbaumprize gmail.com Each voter must submit 3 books . If they submit less than 3, their votes won't count . If they submit more than 3, the first 3 will . count Here is a link to each individual entry , in a random : order Knighthood by Elie Merle The Lost Treasures of Cap'n Blouchard by Sean Loftis A Slope of Pines by Per Jorner Operation Dead Dawn by Tom Perrett

  • What should your documentation metrics look like? Q&A with Zoomin about their 2024 Technical Content Benchmark Report

    Updated: 2024-04-14 07:00:00
    Zoomin recently released a Technical Content Benchmark Report for 2024. This report explains the company's second benchmark report on documentation metrics, which analyzes data from 97.6 million user sessions across 136 countries. The report provides insights into average metrics like page views, bounce rates, time on page, GPT search usage, and more. In this Q&A with Rita Khait from Zoomin, she discusses how to interpret and use these benchmarks to set goals, improve content findability and performance, and demonstrate documentation's value to stakeholders and the business.

  • AI is accelerating my technical writing output, and other observations

    Updated: 2024-04-14 07:00:00
    At the start of the year, I wrote a trends post and noted uncertainty about the directions AI will take tech writers this year. (See My 2024 technical writing trends and predictions.) Now that we're into April, I have a better sense of how things are going and wanted to provide an update here. My main observation is that AI is accelerating my technical writing output, making me about twice as productive as before. Also noted in this post: prompt engineering is a non-obvious skill that many tech writers still struggle with, even though documentation is more within AI's sights than creative content.

  • Simon & Schuster turns 100 (This week in books)

    Updated: 2024-04-05 19:00:00
    This week! Books! First up, the blog will be going on a spring break over the next few weeks while I do some traveling, reflecting, and soccer watching. I’m anticipating a late April or early May return. But I’ll be working and checking email in the meantime, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you […]

  • Which authors will you drop everything to read?

    Updated: 2024-04-03 19:00:00
    With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion! As a reader, I’m a generalist by design. […]

  • Deciding between projects? Put your horses in a race

    Updated: 2024-04-02 19:00:00
    One of the biggest challenges authors face is deciding where to devote their time and energy. You might have five ideas for books and don’t know where to start. You might have a messy revision to tackle when a bright and shiny idea for a new novel appears. How do you decide what to focus […]

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