Looking ahead at Technically We Write

We’re very excited to have recently celebrated our first year at Technically We Write. In that time, you have shared so many fun and interesting how-tos, tips, best practices, stories, lessons learned, guides, and other kinds of articles about how you practice technical communication. We love reading your contributions - and we love publishing them. Please keep your articles coming!

Last year, we recognized several of our top authors by working with an independent artist to create personal digital avatars for folks to use in their social media. It was a fun way to acknowledge our growing community.

And we look forward to growing the community at Technically We Write. For example: this Fall, we plan to publish several free ebooks about technical and professional writing, each centered around a different focus, and collected from the most popular articles on the website. If you want to be considered for the ebooks, please share an article with us! The ebooks will be distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, the same that we use to publish all content on the website. And each item in the ebooks will be attributed to their original authors. That’s one more way that we can recognize and thank our community.

We also plan to give back to the community in other ways. Due to the increasing number of items we run on the website, and our planned work for the series of free ebooks, we will need help. We aim to partner with a freelance copyeditor to help us.

To support our bringing in a copyeditor while remaining independent, we need funding. However, we remain committed to not running ads and not running sponsored content. We want to be open about how the website is funded. Technically We Write is supported entirely by Hallmentum, a consulting company offering workshops and training. The “Supported by Hallmentum” in our banner is a disclaimer, not an ad.

This Summer, we plan to add a Patreon to Technically We Write. This extra support through Patreon will entirely support a copyeditor to assist in editing. Here are a few things to look forward to with the new Patreon:

The Patreon will be entirely optional. This is not selling some “premium” tier of the website. All of the great articles on Technically We Write will remain free for everyone, as always. You do not need to participate in the Patreon to keep reading Technically We Write, or to contribute an article.

We will not run ads. Advertising may keep most websites running - but at Technically We Write, we’re committed to keeping our corner of the web ad-free. Technically We Write does not sell advertising on the website, and we do not offer “sponsored” articles. We hope that Patreon will provide us extra funding that we can use to partner with a copyeditor.

Patrons will get early access to content. When authors share an article with us, we edit the article for grammar, spelling, and flow. (We also provide further edits for authors who request it, such as if English is not your first language). Before we publish the article, we share a “preview” link with the author, so they can review it one last time and make sure everything looks correct, or undo any edits we made. As a patron bonus, we plan to share the preview link on our Patreon after the author has approved the article. If you want early access to articles on Technically We Write, even if it's just by a few days, this will be your opportunity to read articles before everyone else.

We are excited to continue to grow our community in technical and professional writing. We want to celebrate everyone who does technical and professional writing - and that really means everyone. Because everyone does technical and professional writing, no matter what role you have in the organization.

Technically We Write isn’t just about writing documentation. We’re interested in all things “technical communication,” and there are lots of ways to participate in “technical communication.” We want to hear from you! If you want to share your story, email us. Our editor is jim@hallmentum.com