Lately, I have been pondering the issue of version control (also known, according to Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control>, as revision control, source control or software configeration management) of documents. It’s of particular concern when many people are working on the same document with time wasted when someone spends time and effort commenting on an outdated version. Consistent [...]

The Apostrophe Protection Society http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/ has been tracking down examples of misused commas for many years. Now we have the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks that tracks down “amusing” examples of quotation marks that have been used for emphasis, but could be interpreted scarcastically: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/. That got me thinking about other punctuation marks, such as [...]

Here is a link to a video where Stephen Fry gives a grammar lesson. Do you agree with what he says or is he being pedant: http://www.videosift.com/video/Stephen-Fry-gives-a-grammar-lesson-on-Q1

I have been cleaning out the paper and old journals that have accumulated in my files. It’s part of my ‘green’ initiative to store more information digitally or in PDF form. To take it a step further I bought an ebook rather than a paperback at ebooks .com. I could have chosen to read the [...]

Brad Hauck Brad Hauck (Mr Web Marketing) was the other speaker at the National Speakers Association of Australia meeting in Brisbane on 21 July. His topic was Social Media Marketing for Speakers. He mentioned Twitter, the latest phenomenon where people network in under 140 characters and spaces, Facebook, originally set up as a personal entertainment [...]

Social Entrepreneurship Yesterday I attended a National Speakers Association of Australia meeting in Brisbane. Dimity Dornan, who set up the Hear and Say Centre, spoke about her Social Entrepreneurship. One of her big ongoing challenges is funding and her biggest ‘aha’ moments in recent years to deal with this funding challenge is ‘bundling’. That’s a [...]

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) reports that the United States Government has acknowledged technical writers as distinct from all other writing professions, so describing myself as a technical writer distinguishes me from a plethora of other writers. The STC were not successful in getting acceptance of a name change, though; the government preferred ‘technical [...]

It is the word of the week: Utegate, and it may only last that long–not long enough to make it to any dictionary. It is a word in all the news bulletins and has connotations to the political scandal in the United States dubbed WaterGate. However, the scandal looks like going nowhere because someone made [...]