Welcome to the new blog!

I started this blog to separate my professional content from my personal content (primarily quilting, SCUBA diving, and dog training and enthusiasm — if you are interested in that content, visit ItsaBlog). As of today, I’m transitioning to this one for the weighty content, but there are still a couple of related posts on my other blog that might be of interest:

• The Myth of the Round Table (John Maxwell)
• Leadership at LavaCon

My goal is to get some conversation going, perhaps even to be a bit controversial and raise your ire a bit. In response, as Craig Ferguson (@CraigyFerg) says on The Late Late Show, I look forward to your letters. Or comments, tweets, blog posts, or whatever conversational form you prefer.

While most of my rants apply as well to any technical profession, I will state my opinions in the context of practitioners in the roles that (supposedly) make easier the lives of consumers of technical or specialized products, processes, or services. This includes technical writers and editors, information architects, content strategists, user experience professionals, and visual designers, as well as a plethora of additional job titles and role descriptions that I collectively think of as “technical communicators.”

I know that lots of the folks in these professions disagree with my categorization (I look forward to your letters/comments), but I hope not to degenerate too quickly into a discussion of what we call ourselves. I suspect, however, that the inevitable discussion of our seemingly perpetual identity crisis is coming… 🙂

You might be asking, “Why think more, write less when I don’t write?” Mostly because

Think More, Write|Design|Do Whatever It Is That You Do Less

seemed a bit verbose for a blog title. Think More, Write Less is much catchier and is not the old, standby “work smarter, not harder” aphorism. (I watch folks’ eyes glaze over when they hear that phrase.) Also, I do have a small bias toward the word-oriented practices within technical communication, so most folks who know me will associate me more with writing, I suspect.

Hopefully the posts to come will resonate with you, regardless of how you think of yourself and your role in the context of the user experience of technical and specialized products, processes, and services.