How I Wrote My First How-To Manual While Working for Somebody Else by Robert Brents
When I decided to write my first how-to manual, I was employed full-time; I had a wife, and a pre-teen daughter who was in every sport and activity imaginable, and I was delivering seminars and training courses at night and on Saturdays. I had no idea when or how I was ever going to get a how-to manual written!
Then one of my mentors suggested that I carry a cassette recorder in my car and dictate the entire first draft while commuting to my (last) job. And that’s exactly what I did.
When I finished dictating the first draft, I gave the tapes to a transcription service and they created an Microsoft Word document from the tapes, which I then edited, published, and marketed and promoted like crazy. And the rest, as they say, is history. As was the job I had been commuting to while I was creating my first how-to manual.
Nowadays, voice recognition software (like Dragon Naturally Speaking, for example) is getting good enough that you could dictate the whole manual, either directly to your computer, or into a digital recorder that could then be plugged into your computer to allow you to download the digital files into the computer to be interpreted by the voice recognition software.
About the Author
Best Regards, Robert Brents, "The 80/20 Guy"
http://www.RobertBrents.com
For your free four-lesson e-seminar, How To Write, Publish,
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Copyright 2001 Robert Brents and Blue Gecko Press.