Managing Writers Blog Moving

For the last two years, I have used this blog on wordpress.com to follow the development of my book, Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation.

Now that the book has been published, I will be changing the character of this blog to cover other topics. For those only interested in the book, I will continue to post updates at a new site, managingwriters.com. This site also contains all of the previous posts from this blog (but, please be patient with the formatting, which is still in progress).

You can also find information about the book and other publications (coming soon) at xmlpress.net.

Thanks to everyone who supported the development of the book.

Podcast Interview about Managing Writers

Tom Johnson just posted a podcast of an interview with me at his website, http://idratherbewriting.com.

In the interview I talk about Managing Writers and answer Tom’s questions about the book.

Most of the discussion was about managing people, including questions about hiring, evaluating writing samples, motivation, planning, and lots more. If you are interested in the book, the interview is a good way to get more information about its content and about my approach to management.

Thanks, Tom, for taking the time to read the book (and it is clear from the interview that he did read the book in detail), and to speak with me about it.

What Doc Managers Look for in a Résumé

Lately, a lot of technical communicators have found themselves updating their résumé for the first time in a long time. This prompted someone on the Techwr-l mailing list to ask hiring managers in the group what they look for in a résumé.

There are plenty of sources for information about how to write a résumé, but less on what doc managers are looking for. My book, Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, contains a chapter that discusses hiring in detail. I have included an excerpt below that discusses how I evaluate a résumé.  I hope you find it useful.