One of the things that many people don’t know about me is that I have a first-degree black belt in Songham Taekwondo. I was even a state champion in weapons as a color belt for my age group. I enjoyed TKD a lot, until a knee injury took me out. What I like about taekwondo is that it’s a versatile martial art; one doesn’t spend all of the time studying forms alone, but rather a student learns basic moves that will help in other areas such as sparring and weapons. The more skills one gains, the more adept to changes when sparring or using weapons. This is what trained the ancient warrior as well as the modern day warrior.
This kind of mentality is also needed to be a technical communicator. How, you may ask? Well, like a black belt in taekwondo, one has to have many skills to get the job done. One needs to know a little bit of this and that, like technical writing, editing, and content curation–among many other skills–to produce kick-butt documentation and output. But it also helps to have the right tools as well.
For today’s taekwondo student, one can wear various protection pads, and learn how to use weapons–including hands and feet–as the tools to achieve the end goal. For technical communicators, there are various software tools out there.
One of the foremost products out there is Adobe’s Technical Communications Suite 4. With this latest rendition of the Technical Communications Suite, technical communicators have even more options and choices in how documentation and other technical writing output is achieved. There are reliable standbys like Framemaker and Robohelp–both of which have been updated, but there are also additional tools as Acrobat, Captivate, Presenter, and Illustrator. Combined with the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, it seems to me that there is nothing that can stop a technical communicator from being a tech comm warrior!
Tomorrow, on August 21st, 2012 from 10:00-11:30 AM Pacific Time, one of Adobe’s strongest tech comm warriors, Ankur Jain, is going to be presenting the What’s New in Technical Communications Suite 4 webinar,which is not only going to talk about the strengths of this tool, but also the newest and latest features to make it a more effective tool for technical communicators everywhere, including features that now allow technical communicators to bring finished products to a mobile audience. (And you know how pro-mobile I am!)
Register here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=2051812&loc=en_us
Tell Ankur that I sent you by telling him, “I am a TechComm Warrior!” 😉
TechCommGeekMom 
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