Blog Article for Knowledge Owl

About the Project

I delivered a lightning talk about how humans process information and how technical writers can act on that at Write the Docs Prague 2020. Shortly after, a company called KnowledgeOwl asked me to put my thoughts into writing. The blog post explains psychological concepts in a way that technical communicators understand them, and provides tangible advice for their writing.

Read the full article on the Knowledge Owl blog

Process

It took me about 12 hours to complete this project. My workflow looked like this:

  1. Discuss the first draft with the client
    I sent an outline of the topics I wanted to address.
  2. Prepare the first iteration of the blog article
    My writing process focuses on asking questions, such as "What's in it for the reader?" in the introduction. This helps me focus on one thought per paragraph. As I had given a lightning talk on the topic before, I already knew what points I'd like to make in the main part.
  3. Discuss iteration with the editor at KnowledgeOwl
    The editor gave me valuable feedback, such as giving examples on how to implement the tips. I had also decided to put in more visuals to support the article's key messages.
  4. Implement the feedback and hand over for publishing.

Lessons learned

Asking the (right) questions. It was the first time to work together with a professional editor. I was not using the question-based writing approach in the main part, as I thought I had figured that one out. However, a second pair of eyes asking new questions contribute greatly to the content quality.

Capacity planning is tricky. I aimed at a total of 8 hours from content creation to proofreading. However, my estimation was way off, as I ended up taking 12 hours - that's 50% more time than I anticipated. It is hard for me to estimate workloads correctly but I am sure I will get better with experience.

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