On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, Tom Limoncelli wrote:

> I didn't write well (assuming I do now) until I had a professional editor
> give me serious feedback over and over until I started seeing the patterns
> and understanding how to do better.

This is a good point. What I've done to date is get myself enough 
confidence to be able to write for all levels of business technical 
communication. That's everything from explaining issues to helpdesk people 
looking for more details about what just happened, providing text to give 
to end users, explaining topics to technical peers in my areas of 
expertise, explaining things to technical peers out of my areas of 
expertise, speaking to somewhat technical and not at all technical 
managers, and providing coherent after-action reports for big things that 
went grink.

What I do need help on is communication to the general populace. I've done 
a lot of it so far through blogging, but haven't been through the 
professional copy-editor red pen crucible. I'm at the early stages of that 
now for a certain project I have going, so things will improve there. Some 
things, such as the technical details surrounding use of punctuation in 
and around dialog, don't have a lot of presence in technical writing but I 
need to know anyway. Others, such as keeping tenses straight and 
punctuating clauses, are more directly useful. These are the kinds of 
things that are best learned through feedback on my structure, not the 
content.

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