Welcome to our latest feature column, giving you a chance to get up-close and personal with the folks that make In Other WORDS the place for all your Technical Communication needs.

This month we are featuring Dave Benjamin, Director of Sales and Personnel. Originally from Ilford in Essex, which is just outside London, Dave moved to Israel at age 28. He was a member of Kibbutz Malkia for eight years and moved to the fair city of Karmiel in 1998. Dave has been busy enriching the WORDS team since April 2007.

An Interview with Dave Benjamin

1. Remember that your CV is the most important document you will ever write.
   
   
2. Take a copy of your resume and writing samples with you.
   
   
3. Research the company you are going to be interviewed at.
   
   
4. Be ready to briefly describe your experience, showing how it relates it the job.
   
   
5. Answer questions confidently and enthusiastically and make eye contact with the interviewer.
   
   
6. Dress appropriately, be clean, and smell nice.
   
   
7. Following the interview, send a brief note thanking the interviewer. It helps in making a nice impression!

Don't criticize or evaluate ideas during the session

• Use your imagination to do some "free wheeling" thinking. No idea is too wild.
  
  
• Strive for quantity - the more the better.
  
  
• Combine and build the ideas, improve them as you proceed.

Write down all the ideas immediately!

Storyboarding
Here's another technique used very successfully in the business world for a variety of tasks. Clearly, anything that can be done to speed up the content-writing phase for documentation is to be welcomed. Frequently, adopting some or all of the storyboarding techniques can help.

• Don't waste the user's time. Nobody wants to read a tech manual. People go to you because they're stuck - confused, frustrated, and maybe even angry. Remember that.

• Keep it simple -- the oldest admonishment in the book. Save your beautiful prose and love of great words for your novel. If you cannot tell me what I want to know in something other than polysyllabic horse hockey, I'm going to trash your doc and call the help line. Every time. That is a waste of at least three people's time: the customer's, the support person's, and yours. And it costs your company more money. Bad dog.

• Read your work aloud. Make certain that it sounds as natural as technical language can possibly be. It's hard enough to understand some of the subjects we write about. Let's give the reader a break and create text that's easy to digest.

1. Determine whether a given interaction is available - or not available - to visitors speaking a particular language or arriving from a particular country.
   
   
2. Create a metric that objectively ranks what percentage of the total online population can access each level of experience on any given site. We call this metric the Availability Quotient, or "site AQ."
   
   
3. For each site we measured, we derive its addressable online GDP, showing how much of the world's "share of wallet" is represented by that site's total available audience.