There is no doubt that creativity and innovation are key to succeeding in business. Both management and their employees are looking for answers to the following questions:  “How can I fuel creativity in my workplace?” “How can I be more creative?” “Why do employees wait for their managers to tell them what to do, instead of looking for solutions?” “What can my company do to support ideas and innovation?” This article responds to these questions and provides practical ideas on how to fuel creativity in the workplace. I explore the creativity challenge from four different perspectives: th ..read more

This post is part of the book Voice and Tone Strategy: Connecting with People Through Content, the 12th title in the content strategy series of books from XML Press (February 25, 2020) and The Content Wrangler. John Caldwell Content Design Strategist As a content designer, UX writer, or content strategist working with or developing strategies for voice and tone, it could be argued that everything you’re doing is rooted in storytelling. Deep customer empathy, character and voice, meaningful relationships; they all come from stories. Truly understanding why voice and tone works—how it resonates ..read more

In a previous post, I shared with you my brain cancer diagnosis, and my observations of the way healthcare and insurance information were presented to me after brain surgery. This post continues to explore my ruminations made during chemotherapy treatment. “Healthcare does not have a clear pathway for how one finds care. Each consumer’s story is riddled with multiple entryways, internet searches, phone calls and conversations that determine how they eventually connect to the health system.” Healthcare Consumer Insights: The Journey to Finding Care There’s no clear pathway to healthcare and ne ..read more

You can learn a lot about the need for content strategy and information science by undergoing brain surgery and chemotherapy.  Of course, there are less traumatic ways to learn these lessons. I hope my personal story serves that purpose for you. What started with a headache… On Friday afternoon, November 10, 2017, I was diagnosed with Primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma — a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system).  After having complained of a headache during my annual physical examination earlier that day, my doctor referred me to the radiology dep ..read more

The biggest lie we tell almost daily is “I have read and understood.” Users who click “I agree” in order to access websites and apps are participating in a collective reflex. How can we agree to terms and conditions (T&C) that we cannot understand and, therefore, we do not read? The density, opaqueness, and length of almost all such documents make us cringe. Even if we did read them, we’d be giving away months of our lives. According to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, reading just the privacy policies we encounter in a year would take the average person 76 business days ..read more

The Content Wrangler will host a new conference, Technical Documentation RoundUp 2019, an intimate gathering of technical communication professionals interested in learning how modern tech comm shops create, manage, and deliver technical content. The RoundUp takes place at the Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park, CA May 21-23. The event features two days of interviews, discussions, and topic-based presentations, followed by a full day of educational mini-workshops. For technical communicators This three-day event is designed to educate and empower individual technical communicators and to ..read more

The trouble with companies is that they’re full of people, and people insist on having separate personalities and distinct voices. So it’s no wonder that issues of consistency and tone of voice creep into our conversations when we take an honest look at our content. In my Content Wrangler webinar Empower Your Team to Write with One Voice While Still Sounding Like Themselves delivered on Nov. 15, 2017, I discuss the role voice plays in unifying a company’s content strategy. I give suggestions for how you can build a brand voice without sacrificing the individuality of the content creators on y ..read more

When developing content for multiple locales, in multiple languages, companies struggle with the idea of translation versus transcreation. Transcreation is about recreating the content in a language and style that connects with the consumer in a meaningful and emotional way. Professor Nitish Singh and Frank Hartkopf, Head of European Content, Axonn Media, explore the importance of transcreation to create content which truly hits the sweet spot of the local consumer. This Global Marketing Insight video is provided by Brand2Global, the conference for global marketers, September 28-29, 2016 ..read more

  The following is the foreword written by Ulrich Henes from The Language of Localization, edited by Kit Brown-Hoekstra, the eighth book in The Content Wrangler Content Strategy Series of books from XML Press (2017). Adapting content to make it more meaningful, appropriate, and effective Like many of you, I have frequently had to explain what localization is, usually in the context of what I do for a living. I find localization easy to explain, often using the example of getting a mobile phone adapted for other countries. Because most people own one, the ..read more

It’s intuitive to believe that visuals are more memorable than text. To a degree, science confirms this. Research shows that visuals impact recall because they help viewers process information faster and assist them to pay attention by being more engaging than text. But there is such a thing as a forgettable visual. Think of all the information you encounter in a typical week. How much of it do you remember? We forget our lives almost as quickly as we live them, and visuals can still escape our memories. In her July 19, 2017, Content Wrangler webinar, The Science behind Memorable Visuals, cogn ..read more