Play play

I made this crossword for the conference newsletter of STC India's annual conference that happened last week at Bangalore. Take a shot. I'll post the answers 3 days from today.

The crossword is not interactive, so you might want to take printouts... To see a bigger picture, click on the crossword.


To see a bigger picture, click on the clues.

Answers are here.

 

Wishing my blog readers a happy 2009

I am writing this blogpost three days in advance because:

• I want to beat the Web jam likely to happen on 31st night (when "night" happens several times over, starting from Japan and travelling right across to the US of A).


• I want to ensure the post gets uploaded to cloudspace before Blogger decides to cap everything (because Blogger too may have a hangover).

I am writing this post to:

• wish you a very happy 2009.


• share my new-year resolution (I shall henceforth suffer all fools gladly provided they take no more than 10 minutes of my time), and ask you about yours.


• send across my new-year gift-box especially packed for you with the following items:
  
  
  
  • Some very special dangling modifiers, which were being given away free to anyone who purchased a copy of the book "I saw Janus peeking through the doorway".
  
  
  • A book called "Zen, and the Art of Agile Documentation", which is a special kind of book - to read the book you need to constantly run after it - that tells you how to generate Requirements out of Thin Air and create Online Help for Usage Scenarios.
  
  
  • A life-long chance to officiate as the Executioner of Capital Offense Committers, where you execute an "Off with the head!" command every time you come across a sentence such as "The Data Manager retrieves Queries and Historical Trends and presents them as Tables, Charts, and Graphs".
  
  
  • A sneak preview to my new book titled "My Life: In Bulleted Lists".
  
  
  
  

Of crystal balls and a view

Last month, the STC India people made the following announcement:

We are pleased to announce a Writing Competition to coincide with STC India's 10th Annual Conference to be held in Pune.
Topic – Technical Communication in India: A Look into the Crystal Ball
Word Limit – 550 words
Style or Form – Open (essay, parable, fable, tale, poem…)
Format – Plain Text
Deadline – November 21, 2008

I can resist everything except a writing contest so I sent in my entry. It won a prize :-)

================= MY_ENTRY_BEGIN =================


Good evening, and welcome to Crystal Ball. Our guest today is Mercutio Hermes, who shares with us his view on Technical Communication in India. Welcome Mercutio.

Thank you. I notice you said "view", not "views". May I ask why?

Our show is about looking into the crystal ball. We share what we see there, and what we see is only a view.

So, you'll ask me questions, and I'll look into the crystal ball and respond with what I see?

Yes.

Great! Let's begin.

What do you see about technical communication in India?

I see a lot of writing.

What kind of writing?

Someone waving a bunch of APIs and yelling, "Robots can’t code; only humans can. It takes a human to decode a human".

What else do you see?

I see lots of rocket-science documents and aircraft-maintenance documents, and not all are in English.

They aren’t? What language are they in?

Oh, several languages, actually. Tamil, Urdu, Assamese, Dogri.

So, do you see translators becoming more important than writers?

Nope. I don’t see any translators at all. I see specialist technical writers writing in their native languages.

Interesting! Do look in again and tell us what else you see?

There’s a long line of teachers waiting to get themselves e-learning certified, and there’s a line of students - a line of which I see no end – waiting to get their hands on the latest tutorials and voicecasts.

You say you see podcasts in India? That’s interesting.

Yes, I see podcasts entering mobile phones and radio channels. The ones that go into the mobile phones also have annotated pictures to complement the voiceover.

You mean like the Google Chrome release notes?

No, not exactly. These are on-demand doc-support. Techwriters have fed their task modules into a NASSCOM-managed repository that is programmed to read the metadata embedded call-for-help-SMSes, fetch the matching task-module from the repo, and SMS it back to the mobile phone. Techwriters are writing e-modules that are have 10 sentences or fewer.

What else do you see?

I see a child writing an essay "When I grow up, I want to be a doctor. I will study neuroscience and design user interfaces."

What kind of user interfaces do you see?

I see these touch-screen interfaces, mostly not in English, that farmers are using to buy fertilisers and sell wheat. I also see box-like devices where villagers are swiping their bio-cards and doing their mobile banking; and even these interfaces are not in English. I see companies have inserted spy cameras into these devices. Whenever a user is stuck and calls up support, the techwriter who wrote the UI text is penalised.

Okay, so what you’re saying is the market for tech-writing services has gone domestic? It’s no longer international?

No, it’s not that Indian techwriters are no longer writing for international markets. But what I see in this ball is that many of them are writing solely for an Indian market for applications developed indigenously, and customised subsequently for the international market.

What about techwriters in non-Indian MNCs operating from India?

Well, what about them? I see them all there, writing DITA-based topics for Eclipse-based help systems, and predicting the death of Microsoft Word.

Thank you Mercutio. Your view has been interesting indeed.

Thank you for letting me see.

================= MY_ENTRY_END_550_WORDS =================

Blog's on Alltop

Last week, I got a mail from Guy Kawasaki telling me they'd put this blog up at their site Alltop. The blog's under the Technical Writing category.

:-) Wow, someone like Guy Kawasaki thinks this blog is interesting. In delight, I've put an Alltop badge in the sidebar of this blog.

 

Genesis and a prize

I won a prize for my blog post Genesis, before Darwin, of a User Manual. The contest was organised by TWIN.

Translating Tagore

The Sahitya Akademi, in July this year, advertised a literary translation competition in the leading newspapers of the country. The Akademi is celebrating the 50th year of publishing translations through its journals; hence the competition. Entries were invited - translations from Indian languages into English in the genres of poetry, short fiction and oral literature could compete for the following prizes:

• 3 first prizes, one each in Poetry, Fiction and Oral Literature, of Rs.10,000/-
• 3 second prizes, one each in Poetry, Fiction and Oral Literature, of Rs.7,500/-
• 3 third prizes, one each in Poetry, Fiction and Oral Literature, of Rs.5,000/-
• 5 consolation prizes in Poetry, Fiction and Oral Literature, each of Rs.2,500/-
• 50 consolation prizes, of a one-year subscription to the Akademi's bimonthly journal Indian Literature

My entry, Subha, a translation from Bengali into English of a short story of Rabindranath Tagore, won a prize in the last category.

I am thrilled to bits. My entry will actually get published in the Akademi's Indian Literature. Wow!