ROBIN F. RICHARDSON
TECHNICAL WRITER
Articles and Blog Posts
The following projects include two instructional blog posts written for the Writing on the Web class blog and a series of articles that began as a research paper for Theory of Technical Communication and became informative how-to articles.
To view a project, click the title or associated image.
Blog Posts
"Spice Up Your Site with Google Fonts"
Written for Writing on the Web and published using WordPress, this blog post teaches website designers what Google Fonts are, why they should use them, and how to incorporate them into their own websites using HTML and CSS. Google Fonts are free and are easily coded into a web page so that anyone can view the fonts correctly on a browser. Writing the blog posts was a way of putting into practice the rhetorical concept of understanding your audience (classmates, mostly) and establishing an authoritative ethos by clearly knowing my topic yet maintaining a conversational tone.
Contributions to the blog were written by all the students in the class, and, as a graduate student, I served as a co-editor of the blog. Along with the three other editors, I coordinated peer reviews, edited articles, and managed the timely publication of the posts.
"Leaving Breadcrumbs"
This post, also written for Writing on the Web's class blog, teaches website builders about the different types of navigational "breadcrumbs" and how to create a simple breadcrumb trail for a website. Step-by-step instructions are included, along with graphics accompanied by code that show an example of breadcrumbs being created.
This post required quite a bit of research and practice to teach myself how to create breadcrumbs before trying to explain to someone else how to do it. It was an exercise in perseverance and coding, as well as instructional design.
Article Series
"Skills and Qualities a Technical Writer Needs to Get—and Stay—Employed"
This articles series was orignally a research paper written for Theory of Technical Communication. I saw the topic on a list of suggestions, and it stood out to me because the subject is important from the standpoint of a new tech writer who will be looking for a job soon. The series is based on a survey of articles and job descriptions I performed to determine the top skills and qualities a technical writer needs to be marketable in today's workplace. I looked for keywords in the materials that describe what employers want from a tech writer. After tallying the times each quality was mentioned, I chose the top four, then included another that was lower on the list but that, from what I have learned in the program, I thought was important.
The first article explains how the top skills and qualities were determined and includes a table with a complete list of the qualities found in the articles and job descriptions. The following articles in the series include 1) Collaboration, Interpersonal, and Verbal Communication Skills; 2) Writing Skills and the Ability to Organize Information; 3) Facility with Technology; 4) Interview and Research Skills; and 5) Basic Design Skills.