technical writing – Confabulator Cafe

It’s All About Storytelling (Again)

Aspen Junge - February 7, 2013

Humans are a storytelling species. Stories are how we make sense of the world. Stories turn raw data into intelligence. We cannot make decisions without telling ourselves what stories we would like to make true. My federal counterparts hire contractors to do the information collection and repackaging work that I do for the state. On […]

Boring But Necessary: My Nonfiction Life

Larry Jenkins - January 28, 2013

I’ve already got a whole lot of nonfiction in my life, but none of it’s the fun kind. I am a freelance technical writer by trade, and depending on whether I’m in the feast or famine portion of my employment cycle, I spend large portions of my days working on behalf of companies that build cell […]

Becoming Technical

Eliza Jaquays - January 8, 2013

It’s hard to say how, exactly, my writing has changed in the past year. Most of the writing I’ve done has been in new, uncharted territory. This past year I put a pause on creating new content and instead have been working on editing my novel, writing blog posts, and buying guides. So, I suppose, […]

I Have Nothing To Fear From Maternal Attention

Aspen Junge - September 6, 2012

My mom taught me to be a technical writer. It was my first job out of college. Her company needed to hire an hourly “contract” worker (temp, no benefits) to read 20,000 lines of Fortran code and describe them in English. My degree was in the sciences, and I had taken exactly one programming course […]

Why I Write

Aspen Junge - July 28, 2012

Because I’m paid for it. In a career that has spanned multiple mighty professions, writing has always turned out to be my most salable skill. I work in a space that librarians and search algorithm authors call the Long Tail of Information. Think of it this way— a little bit of information is important to […]