Community Spotlight #2

Well, you might have noticed that there wasn’t a community spotlight last week. I was putting the finishing touches on the companion website to this newsletter. It was always my intent to start a blog about blogging to feature here. 

You will find that blog on Suzza.net which launches on September 1st.  

Here is what the community was talking about this week. 

Sarah Rainsberger wrote about deciding what language to use when writing technical documentation. This is good writing advice in general. We should use the right word but only when it provides clarity. There is no point in making a sentence fancy if it makes the meaning of it confusing. A great tool for this is the Hemmingway Editor. It gives advice on how to make your writing easier to understand. 

Ananya Dash published the weekly newsletter rounding up science communication news. Covering the topics of roses, gut inflammation, and Alfred Nobel.

On LinkedIn, I published this article on blogging for networking. Written for a B2B audience, it is much more formal than my typical writing. I usually prefer a conversational style.

I’m always on the lookout for the most helpful advice. Here are three articles that I read this week. 

How People Search: Understanding User Intent by Dan Taylor

This article discusses search intent. It is a way to understand the phrases people type into search engines. We want to write our content so it matches the intent. We can achieve higher rankings this way. As it signals to search engines that we’ve answered people’s questions. . 

Dungeons & Dragons taught me how to write alt text by Eric Bailey

This article on Accessibility was great. I worked as the Director of Community for a tabletop role-playing games publisher. D&D is close to my heart. So, it is interesting to me when people share what they’ve learned from the game. 

A plea for the lost practice of information architecture by Vicky Teinaki

Information architecture refers to how we make info understandable. Vicky says this falls under UX (user experience) now but the background is library science. Vicky wants to return a focus to information architecture as its own discipline. 

That’s it for this week.