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Read my posts about UX, content strategy, AI, technical communication, and more
Human in the Loop: How Technical Communicators Can Govern AI Workflows
Anyone who has worked in technical communication knows that writing is only one part of the job. Sometimes the biggest challenge is figuring out what to do with the content an organization already has. Consider a common scenario. A subject matter expert hands you a...
The Technical Communication Academic Job Market: A Practical Guide
Over the years, I've had a lot of people from different walks of life ask me what the academic job market in technical communication is like. Some are graduate students considering academic careers. Others are working professionals interested in teaching or academics...
AI Governance Readiness: 5 Common Misconceptions About Deploying AI
My newest article with Jackie Damrau and Angel Mancio, AI Governance Readiness in Documentation Teams: Survey-Based Insights Toward Governance Readiness, is now available in the proceedings of the 2026 IEEE Professional Communication Conference (ProComm). In the...
What the MIT Report on AI and Education Means for Technical Communicators
MIT recently released the final report of its Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. The committee was originally asked to assess how students and instructors were using AI, identify innovations in teaching and assessment, and propose...
What Technical Communicators Can Learn from the Navier-Stokes Equation Controversy
OpenAI recently announced that an internal AI system had produced a proposed solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics. The company released both a written proof and a formalization in...
AI and the Brain: What Technical Communicators Can Learn from a Simulated Fly
Eon Systems recently published an interesting example of what happens when research on AI and the brain moves from modeling neural activity to modeling an entire sensory and motor loop. The company has created a virtual fruit fly that combines an existing...
AI-Infused Technical Communication: A Call for Human-in-the-Loop Approaches to Writing, Pedagogy, and Practice
One of the challenges of talking about AI in technical communication right now is that the conversation is moving faster than our shared frameworks for understanding it. Over the past few years, generative AI has gone from something many of us were experimenting with...
User Research Methods in Technical Communication: What We Can Learn from Research Across Contexts
One of the challenges of talking about user research methods in technical communication is that we often assume we are all talking about the same thing when we are not. In some contexts, user research is treated as a carefully scoped, methodologically rigorous...
Using AI for Resumes: What Technical Communicators Can Learn from the AI Life Cycle
One of the challenges of talking about AI in technical communication right now is that too many conversations remain either too abstract or too simplistic. We hear that AI is changing hiring. We hear that résumés now need to be “optimized” for machines. We hear that...