by Liz Russell

If you're a writer like me, news of a fresh assignment brings both excitement and anxiety. New assignments offer opportunities to further our knowledge and expand our portfolios, and they may result in a bonus or a more lucrative contract. But new projects can also inspire angst and dread if you have past experience with projects that involved false starts, unrestrained scope creep, misunderstandings between team members, uncommunicative teammates, or unfamiliar technologies.

by Judy Fraser, in PDF format
This questionnaire includes questions and issues that should be covered early in a project, including questions about the project, documentation, scheduling, reviews, and administrative tasks. Feel free to add comments and additional notes if you have supplemental suggestions from your experience. Based on the number of requests for this article, it's been useful to many other technical communicators.

by Tom Murrell

Consider this: If you want a job, what you need is an interview. I don't know of anyone who has ever submitted a resume and gotten a job offer as a result. The very best you can hope for is that you'll get that call asking you to come in for an interview. It's in the interview that you get the job, not in the resume.

So, your first objective is to land an interview. A simple tool, called a T-letter, can help you do just that. The traditional approach has you developing a standard resume and writing a cover letter to accompany it for every job situation. A T-letter is like a cover letter, except that it doesn't "cover" anything.