Welcome

Technical Writer and Editor Karen Rempel

Hi, I’m Karen Rempel, a New York-based documentation specialist, senior technical writer, and experienced technical editor. Do you need help with a tough technical writing challenge? Let me help you by:

documenting your product or process so that your customers have quick success.
developing new internal or external web content.
creating standard operating procedures to capture knowledge and guide your staff to perform their jobs faster and better.
working with your development team to design products that are easy to understand and use.
taking on a writing job that your in-house writers simply don’t have time for because your business is humming along and staff workload is already at full capacity.

This is my website for showcasing my technical writing experience and helping you get to know me a little. Tell me how I can help you with your top technical writing pain points; call me at 347.362.5677 or send an email to kyr@karenrempel.com.

Technical Writer with Experience and Extraordinary Ability

I have a passion for helping my clients bridge the gap between people, processes, and technology. I specialize in taking on tough technical project challenges and then turning over an easy-to-update system for you to maintain. I create the documentation you need to help your people and business succeed.

I’ve served my professional community, the Society for Technical Communication, as both Chapter President and International Competition Judging Manager. I’ve won technical writing awards at both the national and international levels, and have been recognized for my extraordinary ability in technical writing.

Whether your project is big or small, I’d love to discuss how I can help you solve your documentation challenges. Call me at 347.362.5677 or send an email to kyr@karenrempel.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Technical Writing Recommendations

“Karen is an excellent technical writer and has a great ability to take a high-level approach and translate it to tangible, detailed steps. Her work ethic and quick ability to understand and document requirements is fantastic. She also has a keen eye for the usability of the target system and a strong understanding of what the business needs.”

Christopher Fay, SVP, State Street, New York City

“Karen is an excellent technical writer, with the process-oriented mind of a business analyst and the creative drive of a product designer. It was incredible how Karen took large and complex documents and converted them into lovely pieces that are easily searchable in a modern UI.

She is also an excellent team leader, maximizing the strengths of her team and guiding her members to improve their skills and optimize the quality of their output.”

Te Bai, Product Manager, Bloomberg LP, New York City

“Karen was a genuine asset to our process as a start up organization. Her expertise, professionalism and vast wealth of knowledge proved invaluable as we determined and implemented critical procedures for our teams. Her ability to learn quickly and integrate that knowledge into accurate and critical documentation has been a tremendous value add to our business. In addition to her technical skills, Karen brings a professional yet genuinely friendly demeanor to the group, I would work with her again without question.”

Sally Myers, Chief Risk Officer, Private Bank

“Karen has worked on a Delivery Standardization Handbook for Sysco Canada and has provided outstanding technical writing services. Her ability to provide technical direction on the project was superb; she was further able to quickly integrate as a team member on the project and was able to quickly gain trust with the project committee. We are extremely satisfied with her work and contribution and will look to engaging her service for future projects.”

Jon Tuttle, Vice President, BakeMark

For more reviews of my work, please see Recommendations.

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The X-Factor in User Experience (UX) – New York UX Writer Sprinkles the Fun Flakes in the Fishbowl

This app design is pretty clear, telling the user the valid types of ID and calling for an action (to select). But it would be more clear to say “tap” than “select” since this is a phone app.

When I began looking at my writing experience from a UX perspective for a potential contract at Google, I realized that user experience permeates everything I do. It is the foundation of technical writing.

Technical writers are always asking questions about the user experience:

What does the user need to know?
What is the best way to provide the information?
What level of reading skills do they have?
What is their pre-existing experience with the subject matter?
How can we best accommodate different skill and experience levels?
How do I seamlessly provide the required info, making it findable and making sure it answers all their questions?

What is wrong with this design? What if you want to pay your Macy’s credit card statement. Would you choose “Pay Another Entity,” “Pay a Bill,” or “Pay a Business or Person”? Confusing! Frustrating! The user will likely have to try a few options before they can succeed at their desired task.

The X-factor in user experience design is one more question:

How do we make sure the user’s experience is positive and even delightful?

In my opinion, the technical writer is always the user’s advocate. We have the logical mind to think through every step the user needs to do to perform a task, and on any well-functioning software, app, or web design team, the technical writer is part of the initial design process, collaborating with other experts to find the best way to help the user succeed.

Sprinkling the Fun Flakes

If empathy, logic, and flow are missing, the user is not going to have a good experience, period. If the user can’t figure out what to do, if the app leads to a dead end, if there are no clear indicators of how to find an expected function—the user will feel frustrated and won’t have a positive experience. If the wording is unclear—or worse, badly written or offensive, as in the case of the website of one “UX design expert” I recently viewed—your product is dead in the water.

So cute words, fun graphics, and pleasing haptics are useless unless there is a solid design foundation and clean, clear language.

Technical writers have been helping provide that solid foundation for decades: creating task-focused text that is clear, concise, and useful.

We are the ideal professionals to add the X-factor and sprinkle the fun flakes into the fishbowl:

Compelling, effective language, backed by user research.
Great copy and tone of voice, conveying the brand and connecting personally to the user.
Rewards for accomplishing the tasks. We all like a treat!

Nuff said.

New York Technical Writer Talks Video Storytelling

I recently took a course on video storytelling at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Bob Sacha was an awesome teacher—smart, interesting, and instructive.

Sacha showed entertaining and inspiring examples of videos that have been shot on smartphones, including Hollywood blockbuster films such as Steven Soderbergh’s “High Flying Bird” and “Unsane.” Soderbergh used innovative techniques such as being pushed in a wheelchair instead of using a dolly.

6 Key Principles of Effective Video Storytelling

Choose an opening shot that is going to hook your viewer
Use a lot of close-ups and extreme close-ups to capture detail and evoke interest
Switch camera angles frequently to keep it interesting
Bring it on home with the closing shot—a reward for the viewer, with an image to remember that finishes the story
Use sound to help establish the mood
Evoke emotions in the viewer—we remember how we feel more than what we see or hear

Here’s an example of what I learned. Technical writing “how to” made into art! IMHO! 😉

“Going to California” is a reference to a Led Zeppelin song lyric: “Took my chances on a big jet plane, never let ’em tell you that they’re all the same.” Each pair of students in the class made unique airplanes and unique videos!

Variations on a Theme – Adapting to Your Target Platform

Next I took the principles of great video storytelling and created 3 versions of a video:

Square for Instagram

This one is under 1 minute (timed for an Instagram feed), and square to display well in Instagram.

Short YouTube Version Captures Highlights

This is the length for my Another New York Love Affair art project, where each video is usually under two minutes. It captures the feel of the event, with behind-the-scenes warm-up and a flash on the audience at the beginning.

Full Length

This is the full length of the song. It’s my singing debut, and my Mom might want to see the whole thing!

Top 5 Technical Writing Pain Points

Canadian first aid kit by technical writer Karen Rempel — First Aid for technical writing pain points

As a New York-based technical writer with more than two decades of experience writing for clients in varied industries, in locations from Vancouver to New York to Haiti to Chile, I notice universal themes—pain points that affect all of my clients, whatever their business line or type of documentation.

It’s all about the user experience (UX). If your customers and staff can’t use your product or perform their task, the result is pain and frustration!

Top 5 Technical Writing Pain Points

Here are the top 5 technical documentation pain points:

Obsolete! Existing documentation or procedures are out-of-date
Unclear! Instructions are hard to understand, so staff or customers can’t follow correct procedure
Disorganized! People can’t quickly find the information they need
Incomplete! There are no answers for the particular problem or task
Inconsistent! Procedures or instructions have been updated in one place but not another, leading to conflicting and confusing information

First Aid for Technical Writing Pain Points

Here I’ll tell you how good technical writing documentation addresses these pain points, one by one. Turn your user experience (UX) into satisfaction and delight!

One: From Obsolete to Up-to-the-Minute

Obsolete information is hard to understand by technical writer Karen Rempel — Documentation quickly becomes obsolete without a plan for updating

Time takes a toll on any set of documentation, bringing changes that require updates. Consider this when you create your documentation, and use a system that will be easy to update. Of course, that train may have already left the station, in which case you need:

A Content Management System to keep track of all your source documents
A regular update process and schedule
A system for keeping track of changes, whether it’s specialized software or simply an Excel spreadsheet or an internal Wiki.

Two: From Unclear to Crystal

User test your documentation by Karen Rempel technical writer — User testing is key to ensure your technical documentation is clear

Unreadability leading to lack of understanding is one of the biggest problems with documentation, and it usually occurs because the person who wrote the documentation knows the subject matter well but is not a skilled writer. Ways to ensure your documentation is crystal clear:

Use a simple writing style aimed at an eighth-grade reader
Explain all jargon and technical terms
Get actual users to follow the instructions and test the procedures – sounds like a no-brainer, right? But few companies actually do this!

Three: From Disorganized to Swiss Precision

Organized like a Swiss candy shop by Karen Rempel — Tagged and structured content is as organized as a Swiss candy shop

Disorganized, hard-to-find information is a very common problem, especially with complicated software or procedures that require lengthy documentation. If you have a thick binder of operating procedures or a stack of user guides, chances are, no one will look at them. But even a slender tome won’t help if the user can’t find the information they need.

To make your content findable:

Organize topics with clear titles and headings
Deliver content in a searchable online format so that people can quickly look up the subject
Include alternate search terms in your text or tags, so that people kind find a subject even if they don’t know the exact term that they’re looking for
Organize content by user task, not by the software menu structure.

Four: From Incomplete to Spot-On

Gaps in technical documentation by Karen Rempel technical writer — Do you have gaps in your documentation?

Identifying gaps in the documentation is tricky, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Here are some sleuthing techniques to discover what’s missing and fill the holes:

Test the software or process rigorously, to find out what areas haven’t been documented
Make a list of all the tasks or procedures your users need to perform and correlate this to the existing content to identify gaps
Try doing the task wrong to find out what trouble-shooting tips your users will need
Again, user-test the documentation and watch where they go wrong, as well as what kinds of information they try to look up, then make sure you give them what they need!

Five: From Inconsistent to Single Source

Consistency solves technical writing pain point by Karen Rempel technical writer — Consistency is king!

Inconsistency is a problem that often creeps in over time as different people update the documentation set, perhaps making changes in one place but not another, or using different terminology to describe the same thing. Even different writing styles can be confusing to the end reader.

With technical writing, consistency is king! To achieve it:

Develop style and terminology guidelines, and follow them
Keep on track by having an editor or dedicated staff member oversee all updates when you have a team making changes
Use a Content Management System such as MadCap Flare to single source your text, so that a change only needs to be made in one place and it will be automatically updated throughout your documentation set.

A Cure for the Pain

Pay for the expertise you need by Karen Rempel technical writer — An expert technical writer helps you succeed!

What is your top pain point? Do you need a remedy?

Karen Rempel, technical writing expert, to the rescue!

A good documentation specialist can solve your unique problems and create a set of documentation that meets your user needs and is easy to maintain.
The technical writer is the advocate for your user, and brings a perspective that will help you design documentation that is findable, clear, and easy to follow.
You get what you pay for. If you have a complex project, a product that is complicated to use, or procedures that are difficult to perform correctly, you need an experienced, expert technical writer. Budget for a professional, and you will save money in the long run.