Last November over 80 technical communicators, information architects, and documentation aficionados broadened their horizon at GrowWithFlow, Flow’s highly irregular but equally appreciated technical communication conference. Here is one of the highlights: Enhance your technical writing skills by avoiding common English mistakes.
Even in non-English speaking countries, English is a common language for content: it’s accessible to a broad audience and it is a reliable source language to start translations from (whoops, that’s a preposition stranding).
Not just semantics
For many technical writers around the world, English is not our first language. As a result, it’s easy to make mistakes. These can range from subtle grammatical missteps to inconsistencies in tone or phrasing that demonstrate a professional standards adherence mismatch (better rewrite that noun cluster).
Often, we may (or is it might?) not even realize that our choice of words or sentence structure could be confusing or less effective in conveying our message. By addressing these challenges, our content is guaranteed to be clear, accurate, and professional (🤦 dangling modifier).
Resources to the rescue
We don’t have to go at it alone, of course. As writers, we can learn from standards such as the Microsoft Writing Style Guide, the Apple Style Guide, Simplified Technical English (ASD-STE100) and the best practices of structured authoring.
If that seems like a lot to consult every time you’re unsure, there are also ways to incorporate them into your writing flow. During our event presentation, we demoed some ways you can use AI assistants or built-in editors to flag issues and rewrite text for you.
Where do I sign up?
Do you feel like your English could use a little brush-up? Feel free to email us at info@flowtime.be, and we'll gladly provide you with details to organize a training, in which we help your team dive deeper into guides and standards, with hands-on practice and expert guidance.