Having a good grasp on the concept of control is actually a balancing act between controlling what you can and letting go of what you can’t. Control the design, but also listen to what people tell you. And control the execution, because sloppy execution hampers deployment. Microsoft and Apple have continued to innovate in their own unique ways, and millions of people have reaped the benefits of their products. With the release of Windows Phone 7 just over a year ago, Microsoft revealed a truly innovative user interface.

In a perfect world, an instructional designer (ID) is given content to work with and develop. But sometimes (or all too often) the content is not available because either the subject matter expert (SME) has been too busy to locate it, or the content is simply not available because the product is still in development. Resolving this involves research, interviewing the lead SME, locating product information, and finding other SMEs on other projects who can help you.

This post provides a bit of history about hypertext and discusses different options for displaying hyperlinks. It also seeks input from readers about whether full URLs (hyperlinks) are useful and their preferences for how URLs display.

Technical editor, John Cobb, shares his ghastly experience with projects involving Scope Creep. Just in time for Halloween, the following blog post includes five tips on how to avoid scary technical documentation scope creep.

This post takes a poke or two at those who maim the language through verbicide as well as those who worry about how language evolves. It also meanders a bit into the world of puns and malapropisms but still manages to find its way home.