Carlos Costa challenged me to give a class on the importance of technical writing to his students of Software Engineering. However, he warned me that these students preferred technical topics and might despise management topics, for example. In the end, I decided to approach this class by recounting 21 of my experiences with different writing tools.

Nineteen people attended the special class, including fourteen students. Presenting the 60 slides ended up taking all the 90 minutes available, leaving no time for questions. Alas, students had to hurry up to the next class, which happened in a room in the opposite side of the building.

The audience was kind in the fourteen public reports. Half of the audience appreciated the historical perspective, but one person wondered whether the materials were out-of-date. Five persons enjoyed seeing the variety of editors, LaTeX, and LinuxDoc.

Only three persons explicitly mentioned that the presentation was too long. I interpret that fact as a sign that the topic is interesting enough. But the long presentation prevented any interaction, and eight persons wanted more interaction, examples, or live demonstrations.

The Invitation

We have another formal meeting coming up!

Formal meeting:

• Thursday, May 7th, between 18h00 and 19h30 (be sharp).
• ISCTE-IUL (Instituto Universitário de Lisboa), building II, room D109.
• Avenida das Forças Armadas — 1649-026 Lisboa.

Joaquim Baptista, Knowledge Management Consultant

Joaquim will comment on technical writing tools by drawing on his experience with LaTeX, Linuxdoc, reStructuredText, Markdown, TWiki, Pelican, Perl, Python, SGML and XML, DITA, XSL-FO, XLIFF, and others.

The presentation is mainly aimed at students of Software Engineering at ISCTE, although everyone is welcome. The participation is free, but subject to room capacity.

Attachment

Technical Writers @ Lisbon: The 6th Report

Report of the meeting, including the slides of the presentation. 19 pages.