Two people shared this great link with me, and I made some technical editors happy by sharing it with them. Now I will share it here! Listen to Erin McKean talk about the dictionary in a presentation from TED. Yes, she talks about the dictionary and where it is headed – or not. It is hilarious and fun and full of ideas to ponder. She never flinches at new words the way technical writers can (when marketing turns a noun into a verb)! 🙂 I don’t think she would be offended if she saw how my 10-centimeter thick Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary (Unabridged) raises my monitor on my desk. She’s probably think that was extremely practical. She loves books, as she declares in the video, but the inside is what is so exciting and dynamic that it may no longer fit the form that we are familiar with today.…
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I am a fan of Creature Discomforts! I just discovered these delightful creations from Aardman Animations while writing for another blog. As I wrote in that blog entry, these animations were made to help re-brand a UK charity called Leonard Cheshire Disability. This type of communication appeals to me immensely. I admire the animation work of Aardman Animations and love watching their stories unfold. At the same time, in this case, I am also “educated” about disabilities. Mary Poppins’ rule about “a spoonful of sugar” helping the medicine go down frequently applies to education – and I could add: technical communication. How to get a difficult, serious, sensitive message across in the best possible way? That is a task that many technical communicators face every day. Seeing a presentation like this is a tremendous inspiration, although the effort behind clay or stop-motion animation is so huge that it is definitely…
Comments closedI want to thank Dr. Randy Pausch for recording his Last Lecture so that it can viewed by millions, or rather, so it can inspire millions. Dr. Pausch died yesterday, July 25th, with his pancreatic cancer having the final say. CrunchGear brought me the sad news while I was searching for something else. I don’t remember how I learned about the video of Dr. Pausch’s lecture, now called the Childhood Dreams lecture. I remember thinking that I didn’t have time to watch a video that was over an hour long. I was just going to look at the first few minutes…. An hour and a half later, I was forwarding that video link to friends. To say that the lecture is inspirational is an understatement. Carnegie-Mellon had the concept of a lecture series where professors gave a lecture as though it was the last one they would ever give. They…
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