A learning strategy developed by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. — Our ability to learn and understand complex, abstract concepts is part of what makes us human. But have you ever wondered why some people just seem to understand everything quicker than you, or what you can do when you just get stuck? A 2015 Dartmouth study found that some people…

Beyond the standard “Know your audience”. — Alright, spoilers: You still need to know your audience. For tips on performing audience analysis, check out my article below: How to do an Audience Analysis Step-by-step with examplesannafitz-ux.medium.com Without further ado, let’s dive right in. 1. Spend more time on research You can’t explain something you don’t understand. As much as everyone might wish this to be true, you can’t just sit in front…

Step-by-step with examples Audience analysis is used in many fields, from public speaking to marketing, product design to documentation, with the focus on understanding the needs and wants of your audience. The goal of audience analysis is to gather measurable information about your audience so that you can better tailor…

And does it differ from other types of writing? When I was a student, I had friends and family ask about my major, and the conversation usually went like this: What are you studying? Technical communications. What does that mean? Um… I would write technical documentation. And the conversation devolved…

Or any other ticket tracking system. — How does your team track documentation requests? Email threads? Spreadsheets? Hastily scrawled post-it notes? Hopefully, it's not the latter. At any one time, I’m usually keeping track of 20–30 different requests for various products or initiatives. I’m busy, but I’m not stressed. That’s because I know where everything is, what…

Any writer can tell you that most of the time spent working on a draft isn’t actually in the writing — it’s in the editing. If I had to put numbers on it, I would estimate that for any given project I spend 30% of my time writing and 70%…

TL;DR: Ask lots of questions — In December of 2019, I graduated with my Bachelor’s of Science in Technical Communications from ASU. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (and so very ready to quit my job at Starbucks), I almost immediately stumbled into my first ever “real job”: a junior technical writer at a small SaaS company. Three very…