Devoted to technical writing and technical writers

My name is Jeff Carr. I have a brief bio about myself at my Do Real Time blog (which I hope you'll read, too), but I thought I'd expand on that here - particularly the part about how I became a technical writer.

I've been writing about and designing interactive information systems since 1989. The first was done on spec for the Amateur Athletic Union; a proposal for a nation-wide database built on the Eastern European model, which helped identify sports-gifted children. The second was an interactive fitness logging system for adults called My Coach, and was the first such system ever hosted by a national services provider.

With the advent of the Internet revolution in 1994, I've written web content, online help, tutorials, user guides, reference manuals, installation manuals and other technical writing projects for companies like Shopping.com, AltaVista and several IdeaLabs start-ups.

Currently, I'm a contract technical writer and instructional designer working on productivity guides for the upcoming Windows Vista and Office "12" releases at Microsoft.

Now, here's what I plan for this blog. You'll see paying markets for freelance technical writers, my sense of where technical writing is going in the future, skills that are beneficial to acquire, and an emphasis on the most important of job roles for the members of our profession - that of making the complex, simple.

In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”