2017

In the native language of most of our team members, German, consistency can even be defined as “continuance, solidarity, closeness and calmness”. Thinking of the old Christmas tradition of families and friends coming together and celebrating festively and peacefully, the word “consistency” as we know it gets an interesting twist.

The possibility to use STE (Simplified Technical English) to standardize the corporate language sounds appealing. But there are several aspects that need to be observed. For example, "a pinch of STE" would basically conflict with the concept of the standard.

AI in content creation is not about "bad robots" which make authors superfluous. Rather, authors can stay in control while using AI technologies for authoring assistance to optimize their content.

Consistency is very important for block-based content. An author assistance tool helps you to ensure textual consistency.

A company's content "landscape" resembles an autumnal garden in many ways. Both of them need grooming and proliferation control. For your content "landscape", author assistance tools help to tackle the challenges.

About the art of not losing your readers. Incomprehensible texts miss their objective and lead to a waste of time and financial resources. Thus, it is important to check the comprehensibility of your own text and to optimize it, if necessary.

Empathic design is all about the users wishes, worries, and tribulations that can be read between the lines. Empathic design is not always easy to achieve and does not come without cost, but effort and costs are worth it.

It is important to decide collaboratively about the collection of corporate terminology. However, use of terminology that has already been approved should not be impaired due to the work that is still in progress. Even a terminology check on the basis of an incomplete terminology database leads to text quality improvements.

Content is the talk of the town. One thing is for sure: to remain visible, you need to keep at it. You need to remain up to date, make sure you don't miss anything, and serve all channels. Marketing contents are written, published in the form of press releases, printed, twittered, ... Even in the field of technical documentation, standalone printed manuals belong to the past. Nowadays, printed formats are supplemented by online help texts, release notes, product videos, and technical newsletters. Though the transition between marketing and technical documentation may be fuzzy, one thing is for sure: the content must reach the target audience. As a technical writer or marketing specialist, we sometimes feel like content machines, don't we?

In the numerous customer conversations I've had with customers this year, I've clearly seen how much the digital transformation has affected companies the world over. Information represents the central aspect of the digital transformation.