Skip to main content

4 posts tagged with "Human Health"

Neurodiversity, physical health and wellbeing, healthier workplaces.

View All Tags

The value of emotional intelligence in technical writing

· 7 min read
Liz Argall
Technical Writer and Program Manager

IQ predicts how well you'll do in your school years and how much salary you can make over the course of a career because it says what job you can get... but once you're in those professions everybody else is about as smart as you are, and that is where emotional intelligence kicks in. - Daniel Goleman

Many technical writers are fairly empathic people. To be good at our job, we need to care about user experiences, we need to be able to imagine different scenarios and meet different needs. I know that I am sometimes better at understanding the needs of others more than my own. Other peoples needs are interesting puzzles, my own needs can feel more like irritants that get in the way of me doing stuff!

Emotional Intelligence Comic Transcript. A two column, two row illustrated table. Know and Act are the columns, Self and Others are the rows. Self/Know is self-awareness. Little Liz smiles and looks at herself. Self/Act is self-management. Little Liz sits cross legged in a meditation posture and smiling. Others/Know is social awareness. Little Liz leans forward to look at a dog. Others/Act is relationship management. Little Liz and the dog rush towards each other.

But, it turns out, if you don't honor all the aspects of emotional intelligence you're selling yourself short and creating problems for yourself. As Ramona Hacker points out, too much empathy can sometimes be a barrier to full emotional intelligence. The noise of so much empathy can drown out too many other parts or give the illusion of strong emotional intelligence when there are aspects that need more work.

Management of over enthusiastic infodump over chat!

· 11 min read
Liz Argall
Technical Writer and Program Manager

Infodumping is when you provide a whole lot of information all at once. It's a term that's been used for some decades when critiquing literature and has been adopted by autistic communities to refer to our tendencies to excitedly enthuse on a topic.

Documentarians (aka technical writers, content champions and word nerds) are prone to this trait. In some ways technical writing is an ongoing wrestling match with infodumping as we take on vast amounts of information, process and subject matter expertise and transform it into content that can be used and understood with greater ease.

In an increasingly remote world, our non-technical writing colleagues can find our facility for writing things down a little bit overwhelming. It can be especially frustrating for technical writing when even asking questions can trigger overwhelm in others as it floods their brain with new angles and questions. We can feel stuck in a bind where we're simultaneously told to ask questions, but also please don't communicate so much!

This is why when I was putting together the Neurodivergent Quality of Life Prioritization Matrix management of over enthusiastic infodump over chat was one of the first criteria I listed.

In this blog post I share some tips and tricks I find helpful, as well as some advice from fellow Write the Docs peers. We'll never get it perfect, but perfect is never the point.

thingswithout.com cartoon, Thing 1: does practice make perfect? Thing 2: no. Things 2: practice can be much more interesting. Words float in the air as the Things dance, adaptability, resilience, fluidity, new questions

Attend to the work

· 11 min read
Liz Argall
Technical Writer and Program Manager

This essay started as a love letter to mindfully turning up. I wanted to write about the power that comes from turning up a little bit at a time consistently. As I attended to the work of blogging regularly it evolved to be a love letter to processes, structures, systems and their interconnections. This essay gives you a tour of philosophies and metaphors that may feel disconnected at first, but all feed into creating meaningful, effective work while avoiding burnout.

Due to the nature of this essay, I've only done minimal edits while typing. This essay is a love letter after all, and it wouldn't do to over work it!

Let's begin

Over the last few blog posts, I've shared some resources for mindfully turning up for your docs and for yourself.

If you look at these resources you might get a sense of overwhelm. OMG, there's so much to do and I haven't done it all! It's easy for your mind to shut down and decide, if you can't do it all, what's the point?

Neurodivergent quality of life prioritization

· 5 min read
Liz Argall
Technical Writer and Program Manager

Jump straight straight into the Neurodivergent Quality of Life Prioritization (NQLP) Matrix:

illustration of a spiky haired character called Little Liz, a ferret is sitting on her head. Its tail is in front of of her face. A caption underneath reads "Dang brain weasels can make it hard to see!"

Creating a framework to manage the brain weasels

Whenever life doesn't go to plan, there is an opportunity to self reflect and find opportunities to learn and grow. This is a useful habit to cultivate and can turn adversity into an alchemical experience.

What is not helpful, is to look at the data, look at all the variables that go into being a human and come to the conclusion that you are a trash human/need to improve across all the criteria. This is especially challenging when you're not even sure what the criteria are, or perhaps the criteria changes as you analyze yourself from different angles.