Sylvia Allen’s greatest strength as a freelance technical writer is her ability to convert highly technical or specialized information dumps by experts into useful, user-focused, well organized documentation.
She understands the different communication needs and styles of technical, management, marketing, and end-user customers, and can translate from one to the other. She is able to establish rapport with these very different customers and reach agreement among them.
Sylvia has over 20 years’ experience in managing successful information design, instructional design, and performance support projects. She has used countless different tools during that time and can pick up and use any new tool required by a project.
She has experience creating knowledge bases, job aids, FAQs, product manuals, information banks, tech support systems, electronic performance support systems (EPSS), just-in-time help, white papers, tutorials, classroom training materials, and training modules integrated with performance support.
Sylvia has worked on projects for Oracle, Sun Microsystems before its acquisition by Oracle, the California State Automobile Association (CSAA), GST Internet, and numerous small to medium-sized tech companies and startups.
One of her favorite projects was the creation of a performance support system for CSAA. For this project, she designed the structure of the EPSS, wrote content for it, helped design a custom authoring tool for it, taught CSAA employees how to write effective content, and facilitated meetings in which technical, management, marketing, legal, and end user representatives all requested changes and signed off on designs and content.
Another project she especially enjoyed was rewriting a doctoral dissertation about recent technological advances in telecommunications by a technical expert who was not a fluent writer of English. He had made multiple previous attempts but the dissertation had not been accepted. The challenge here was to understand the highly technical information the candidate was trying to convey and present it in clear, graceful English. The dissertation was successfully completed and the candidate received his degree.
Sylvia, I just wanted to let you know that my dissertation was accepted today. It has been a long journey. I couldn’t have done it without your help.