semicolon

bravo to Chrysler's

2009-09-22T06:03:00.000-07:00

head of technical publications:

Chrysler announced that digital owners’ manuals will replace their paper predecessors starting in 2010. The automaker is the first to switch from dead trees to DVDs, and estimates the move will save 930 tons of paper annually.

read on: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/09/chrysler-eliminates-the-paper-owners-manual/

GUI based application help

2009-07-23T05:22:00.000-07:00

I started responding to this article about not include screen shots in GUI documentation. Then I went off topic so I'll just post my thoughts.

The problem of managing screen shots in GUI application documentation has dogged me starting 15 years ago - fresh out of college and a new tech writer.

Creating and maintaining documentation that includes screen shots is a nightmare. I'm surprised that GUI API suites haven't created a tool to make images and image regions structured. Pairing that with an authoring application that understood such structure and could apply style rules to the interaction of the master document's layout could help.

Actually, when you think about it, it's crazy that we document on-screen procedures in a separate paper-document or window. I'm sure those of you who write docs for GUI based applications on a daily basis think about this all the time.

An alternative is for help to be delivered as an overlay/layer over the GUI. that would be sweet.

Anyway what I'm saying is we don't have the tools for the most helpful Help/documentation. It's a minus for the user and tech writer. And that's sad considering that GUI based applications have been in widespread use for 20 or so years.

Maybe someone can point me to a well-woven/efficient application+help example. I'm just not aware of any.

documentation nightmares: car seats

2009-05-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

I was going to make this post 3 years ago, but didn't. Now I have another opportunity.

I consider myself technically adept at mechanical things.

Building Ikea furniture? Easy and fast - rarely do I need the directions.
Fix my car? Sure, I'm at home under the hood and under the chassis.
Soldering circuits? Been doing that since 6th grade.
Fear of disassembling anything? Nope not really.

So you would think that installing a car seat would pose no problem, especially after I've had experience, and considering I am a documentation professional. Well, no.

Certainly you want absolutely 0 margin of error for your car seat installation. This is my family's 3rd car seat - the one we purchased this weekend was a Booster / forward-facing-harness seat. And like I always do, I stuck to the directions. And that's where I failed.

Here's the problem as I see it: The pocket-sized, 35-page guide includes procedures for:

Booster seat operation
Harness seat operation

And attaching the seat to the vehicle via:

LATCH
Seatbelt with shoulder strap
Seatbelt without shoulder strap

So that's potentially 6 scenarios. In addition, the text warns of procedures not to follow that may only be applicable to the scenario you are not following. It's confusing, not reassuring, and highly annoying.

My guess is they cram all this information into a little booklet to stay attached to the car seat, and the lack of clear directions is probably designed so they can CYA, legally.

I don't object to including the product manual as is, but they should publish more refined instructions in a larger format. A nice 2' x 3' poster with line graphics that tells you each step you must explicitly follow would be a great start. In fact, one poster-sized document per scenario would be very good. Personally I think the best solution would be for their documentation to interface with a database of car specifications. You could go to the website, choose the car seat model, choose your car model, and their system would automatically generate the documentation you need.

(Image courtesy of dfb)

tech writer job security

2008-12-15T08:56:00.001-08:00

I think these days every worker is looking over his or her shoulders for the proverbial pink slip**. While companies are probably going into hibernation mode, let's remember how important documentation is.

A complete product includes documentation. It might be a formality that people like to laugh at, but it is a requirement. Wise management, under economic duress, will cut development in step with documentation (and sales, and marketing, and support). Very few organizations will purchase a complex software product without a sufficient doc set.

Wiser management will realize that excellent documentation can offset a support staff.

I've heard the stories about how the technical publications departments are the first to go, but I have a feeling they're exaggerated. And if all the writers are sent home first, as a barometer of the company's health, the whole development staff is not much behind.

** note: a simple way to stay somewhat sane is to NOT read economic blogs. they will scare the heck out of you.. ask me how I know :(

detailed concepts

2008-12-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

The following thoughts were initiated by reading this great post by Alan J. Porter on how traditional structured content is losing primacy.

Structured and formal content is not going anywhere. It is probably still as important to our ways of exchanging, archiving, and mutating ideas as ever. The rise of the web, of so much of the whole of human experience available to us at any moment has initiated a period of people using more content than ever before. But it's that smaller pieces of content are being used in exponentially greater amounts.

I'll give a quick example that shows where this is happening. Let's say there's some new drug on the market used to treat farsightedness. pre-web there would be research building on theory, and then clinical trials, followed by approval, marketing, and use by the general public (ok this is totally out of my league, but I'm just throwing out an example).

Now, the process and documentation of bringing that drug to market were extensive as everything is required to be captured by law. Later, an interested individual would learn about the drug either through their doctor or a friend or advertising. If they had questions, they could ask those people, or maybe find information in some reference guide. Tho' it's unlikely that they could find truly detailed content unless they took up the search full time (or knew how to navigate pharmaceutical/medical references).

Today, all of the references are easily available to us. Personal stories about drug therapies are available to us. One can start reading and reading, and if necessary cross reference relevant technical literature, ignoring the bulk of the published literature. Without wading through the mountains of data you could search and find information on drug X and high blood pressure.

Certainly in the pre-web days this information was available, but it might be pretty difficult to find. The web has enabled more people to access this information directly, leapfrogging all of the background or supporting words that only an expert would have consumed.

I believe that we must be cognizant that some of our readers are just looking for small nuggets of information; tho' this audience may only find what they're looking for with a search engine, and they would never use an index.

Maybe a good question for the experts to consider is how DITA and other structured formats can optimize their content for search engine crawling and successful hits on a given query.

my failure as a blogger

2008-12-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

I've been around the block on the Internet. I got my first Internet email account the 2nd or 3rd week of college in '91. To me, the WWW is just one part of the Internet. But obviously things change and mature and I haven't kept up. Which is to say I used to be thoroughly engaged in the culture and society of the Internet, but as we're in post-Web2.0 times, I have lonely facebook, myspace and livejournal pages. My 4 or 5 blogger accounts are mostly stagnant, and my personal website is used as a photo album to share with my family who lives out of state.

I love the technology, but for several years the web has been about people and interpersonal communication more than anything, and I haven't really kept up in this realm.

So the other night Arianna Huffington was on john stewart, pushing her book on blogging. Within 6 minutes time she shed light on why it's so tough for me to gain any traction blogging.

First she says "blog your passions." Ok that's not too tough. ~~I love to write about~~ I have thoughts and opinions I'd like to share about tech writing, and tech, and media, and music (and their intersections). But then she said how blogging is about getting your thoughts down and firing them off quickly...

Do you know how many draft blog posts I have saved???? I think the TW in me wants to take the time to write down concise thoughts, not leave ideas hanging, and try to direct the reader toward a conclusion (don't you just hate it when you post about X, and the thread goes to some minor point you made in passing that could have just as well been left alone???)

My wife turned to me and said "you even write out your phone calls before you make them!!" (which i do sometimes because I want a precise query).

Perhaps this is where my shortcomings of being a real writer is apparent: Given a controlled topic to write on, I'm good and fast. But given the task of writing open-ended, engaging prose that people want to read and respond to, I fall short.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Arianna Huffington

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

why the attention?

2008-11-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

So why am I ranting about subject-oriented technical writing? Well for reasons of fate, it's the primary type of writing I've done in my professional life. I'm proud of my work, and I'm proud of what good S-O TWing can accomplish. Yet, I feel like it gets shafted in technical writing communities. (hey, my baby is beautiful too!)

Take a glance at the excellent Writer River. If you read past the headlines, you'll notice that many of the submissions focus on user-oriented writing. I used to read techwr-l regularly, and besides their discussions on the inanities of grammar, and implementing single sourcing through structured languages, the most talked about topic was creating effective documentation through user-centric writing and what it means to be user-centric.

Another reason why S-O TWing gets the shaft is the more the writing is only responsible to the facts, the more it's feared by the average professional writer. I say this not from first hand experience, but I'm drawing from years of reading technical writers' ramblings. The essence is that most TWers like to engage in the act of writing (which might have been what brought them to TWing in the first place). Yet S-O TWing zaps much of the enjoyable art and craft from the exercise.

There's also no ongoing writing challenge in S-O writing after you get it: once you master the logic of presenting clear, factual, expository or descriptive writing, you've got the craft. What can only sustain you this point is enthusiasm for the content itself.

Like everything, this is not black or white. While I can say that my work is mostly S-O writing, if I said that there are no user considerations, I'd be lying. In real life, my work severely tilts heavily toward being responsible to the content, but I'm still mindful that the reader is trying to get a job done. I'm still going to use transition words to make the reading flow, I'm still going to use visual formatting cues to make the document easy for the eyes to follow, and I still mix up sentence patterns so that I don't present 1000 pages of S-V-O constructions.

One final note: While S-O writing product usually falls into the class of a project's requirement, it's a business formality. It communicates concepts and details for the sake of reliability and sustainability. Using S-O writing for user-centric purposes gets all sticky, but that's the subject of another post.

subject oriented technical writing

2008-11-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

It's been bugging to write down some of my thoughts on a fundamental technical writing dichotomy. Before we can even talk about audience, realize that your documents fall into the following camps (or a combination thereof):

user-oriented
subject-oriented

This is important to consider and be cognizant of because subject oriented TWing gets comparatively little attention, yet I believe encompasses a huge amount of professional technical writing output. So I'll give my quick, ideologically-pure definition of subject-oriented writing.

Subject oriented technical writing is only responsive to the topic it documents. It must faithfully and completely explain itself and create new context and explanation where needed. It is legalese in form and does not owe anything to its creator or reader.

So, any time you are hired to document an organization's system, process, or configuration, you are primarily hired to create this type of content. Usually, subject oriented technical writing is a contract requirement meant to capture how the contract was executed. And what's the final destination of this product? Well it ends up on the shelf in a binder, in an archive directory, or on a CD or backup tape stored in a mountainside. No glory for the writer.

Let it be said that subject oriented technical writing is dry by nature; it is not sexy; it is just the facts & perhaps even-handedly considered opinions. As a computer industry writer, let me say that the shining example of this type of writing is the collection of RFCs.

I would guess that something like a tenth of all technical writing is purely subject oriented.

Common blog posts by tech writers

2008-10-29T06:03:00.000-07:00

I find it interesting that so many articles about technical writing are of the what it's like to be a tech writer variety. Let's posit why this is the case:

technical writers are vain, and like to write about themselves
no one ever really set out to be a technical writer, and the journey to get there is a large part of the process
no one knows what the heck a technical writer is, so we're filling the demand for an answer
as communicators, technical writers are compelled to share their take on the story
because tech writers are often playing catch-up with their subject matter, writing about what they already definitively know is an attractive proposition

I'd give the most weight to bullet point #2. I think there are numerous jobs like tech writing that are hidden within the layers of business, it's just that we have the immediate tools (and free time) to tell the story. The variety of well-paid, intellectually-challenging, nichey jobs in the professional world never ceases to amaze me.

That said, I'm planning a my post on this topic soon...

best practices for moving content between documents

2008-09-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

I'm actually here to solicit information about moving content between documents in an established documentation set.

I think the story is pretty common: you've been documenting a product for a number of years - feature XYZ initially had 20 pages of documentation. This grew to 50, then to 100, then added other supporting documents like reference tables. It's time to give this feature its own document.

So how do you handle it? Are there any pitfalls involved with simply moving the feature and describing the move in document release notes? Should you put a pointer where the text used to be: "XYZ has been moved to Document #09828202, section 2."

Honestly, I don't get much user feedback, except when something is explicitly wrong or incomplete. So as much as I can anticipate confusion, I probably won't get any desperate help requests, but I'd like to do this the right way. How do you handle this situation?

Tools and User Interfaces

2008-08-14T05:26:00.000-07:00

Nudged by Tom's post, I have a quick comment on UI awareness.

I find it funny that some software tech writers don't care much about user interfaces and application usability. We should have a keen eye for appreciating and advocating the user's needs. It's not a stretch then to apply these considerations to ourselves!

My cues that people are not paying attention to how they interact with applications can be demonstrated by their browser use. We get to watch others use browsers in all sorts of informal situations. Here are a few behaviors I've noticed that indicate when someone is not attuned to workflow and UI efficiencies; when the question "how can I do this faster or better?" is never asked.

Using the Bookmarks drop-down menu exclusively - It is tough to imagine that some people haven't noticed the bookmark bar.
One window per webpage - Tabbed browsing was one of the best innovations ever. There have been lots of nice incremental changes, but high praise for this. I still see some users with 12 unique instances of browser windows scattered on their desktop.
Typing "google.com" manually for all searches. It blows my mind to think that some people haven't noticed the search box next to the address box. Excepting that, you would think that users could at least bookmark pages that the visit regularly.
Use of internet explorer - I don't care, and I am not a firefox advocate, but anyone who used IE6 through its darkest days is completely out of touch.

I honestly don't want to sound petty. I believe that GUI-based applications have evolved to a semi-mature level where certain techniques have proven their high worth. When heavy computers users (even if use is only mandated by your job) who should also be attuned to how people use computers don't take advantage of these shortcuts, it shows a lack of a primary skill required for your job (either that or an extreme ability to compartmentalize skills and tasks).

It's like there's a "how can I do it better?" circuit that some people don't have or choose not to develop. If I were hiring, the presence of this facility would be a big hire/no-hire determiner.

Firefox 3 adoption rate and the culture of the Internet

2008-06-26T06:17:00.000-07:00

Ars Technica (Which is increasingly showing its bias and has lost some esteem as of late) runs this article entitled 20 million Firefox 3 downloads in a week, ~4% market share. I want to go out on a limb and pontificate on this data.

I believe that not everyone who intends to upgrade soon has had the chance. (I upgraded at home on the second day because FF2 was slow and had that memory problem (and my wife would never restart firefox, resulting in frustration for her). I haven't upgraded my 2nd home machine, nor have I upgraded my work machine.

But lots of people are enthusiastic for FF3, whether for technological reasons, or for general nebulous Internet enthusiasm (the big news of the week). I'll take a step backwards and suggest that those who upgraded make up most of the Cyberculture drivers (i.e., those for whom the Internet plays a part in their lives). So what I'm really getting at is that Internet-people only make up 5-10% of the Internet.

I've noticed in many blogs and articles, tech-writing and otherwise, people make assumptions about users based on what they believe an Internet User is*. But remember, an Internet User is only one who is visible on the Internet, and I believe that only accounts for at most 1 in 10 users. So, my point is for writers/UI designers/etc to be careful to not assume a user's behavior or needs based on 10% or less of the population.

*that is to say: I have 254 entries in my blog roll, I wake up to 1000+ new articles in my RSS reader daily, my pajamas have a special pocket for my iPhone so I can read twitter messages in my sleep; this makes up half of my human interaction and now I know what people and computer users are like

** I am posting this from Safari on windows. I like safari, although its font rendering on XP leaves something to be desired.

the visual society

2008-05-23T04:47:00.000-07:00

Do you remember way back when, in grade school, as an excuse for poor performance, students would say "well I'm a visual learner." And then I suppose sometime in the 80s or 90s it became accepted that some people have an easier time understanding concepts if they don't have to pull the meaning out of pure text. I always felt that with the rise of the GUI, we as a society became more and more visually oriented.

Anyway, this website, graphjam, is cute because it indicates how easily we're able to encode pop culture in visual forms. You could probably also say that visual data presentation is so ingrained in our culture that we've reached the point of parody. Interesting to note, often you'll run across a graph where the author either didn't pick up on the subtleties of the saying or lyric, or doesn't quite have a perfect understanding of the visualization technique.

more graph humor and song chart memes

cool tech

2008-05-21T11:36:00.000-07:00

OK, here's a simple question:

What is (one or two of) the coolest, most interesting, got-your-blood-pumping, technology or concept you have ever documented?

Two of mine (working on the big bad production network, no not BBN):

Multicast
Network performance vis a vis jitter, latency, and packet loss.

wiki this and that

2008-05-20T05:22:00.000-07:00

I'd say that the days I don't visit wikipedia are rare and definitely the outliers. Have you contributed to wikipedia? (I have in 2 minor ways)

My post and question on the role of wikis in Technical Documentation is short. Let me first contrast between wikis and formal documentation:

Wiki-Generally non-hierarchical collection of documents that can be edited by the wiki's audience.
Formal Documentation-Rigidly organized collection of documents that can not overtly be edited by the audience.

Without laying out some pseudo formal frame work to elicit responses, here is my question:

The tech writer generally wears 3 hats: Content Manager, Editor, Technical Writer. Are all three of these hatted people cheering for wikis to supersede formal documentation? If not, what is the balance that should be maintained

I ask this as someone who generally acts as a Tech Writer and sometimes Editor, and in general doesn't really like the idea of wikis invading the realm of formal documentation.

*Maybe this three-hatted person is known as a Content Professional, but UGH on that title*

Documentation and Change

2008-04-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

Here's an issue that many of us run into (I'd like to think). What happens when you want to change something in your documentation that's not necessarily broken? What’s the best way to handle mere upgrades and nonessential documentation improvements?

I ask this b/c many writers and editors are loath to make changes if something isn't necessarily broken. If a fact is misrepresented or wrong, it's generally not a problem to fix it. But if our evolving experiences can identify a product improvement, it's often a tough sell to make the change.

Things like boilerplate text, layout, formatting, descriptions, and logical flow of a document are all fair game for improvement. I don't claim to get things right the first time. I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to get things right initially. It's only after a waiting period and a sufficient amount of reflection that someone can claim to have nailed down the BEST way of doing something; progress is iterative. I believe that journeymen technical writers have a much higher hit rate of near perfection the first time, and I'm approaching that point - but not yet.

The resistance to make changes I believe comes from the fear that you will confuse and disorient the user. This is a fair critique. A second resistance to change is the extra work that comes along with implementing the change - and the need to implement the change everywhere and at once. A lot of work is involved with a proper system-wide change. Third, a change that works somewhere might break something in a remote part of the system. You're really taking a risk by making changes in a system that already is functional. Fourth, you set a bad example and expectation that nothing is set in stone, and anything can be changed at any moment which might lose your reader's trust.

Please reply and add your thoughts on why non-necessary change should be avoided in technical documentation.

I'm planning a follow-up to refute this in a later post, so save your change is good! replies for then.

steel cage job title championship match

2008-04-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

Two disclaimers:

I acknowledge that these titles are arbitrary.
The distinction I describe is my own and my thoughts probably represent the minority.

Less so in recent years because I've had steady, happy employment, but I often agonize over the definitions of technical writer vis-à-vis applying to job postings. Documentation Specialist is probably the second most common job title (which I held in two government positions) which every TW-type job applicant searches. So when one is bored, fretting, and unemployed, trying to sort out the difference between the two is happily time-consuming. I'll add that the HR people who submit job postings probably don't give the difference a second though. But you know, we're writers - so we obsess over definitions.

I don't know if this was the purpose of the blog entry or not, but Collin Turner's discussion of a subject matter expert (SME) has helped me make a sharp distinction between technical writer and documentation specialist.

SME is a term that's thrown around loosely (at least in my experience), but Turner starts with a salient point in that an SME "provides needed content." The SME is the source of the content. The documentation specialist then chaperones the content through the documentation process until a product is published.

In my limited world view, I'll suggest the following difference: While neither the technical writer nor documentation specialist creates the product (computer application, piece of hardware, or process) that must be documented, the technical writer creates and is ultimate responsibility for the content supporting the product. He or she performs the requisite research inside and outside of an organization to identify, collect, and organize this content.

Collin Turner's description acknowledges these internal conflicts, but lays the organizational knowledge arbitration at the SME's feet.

When I am wearing my technical writer hat (which I like to wear most of the time), I am navigating my organization and available resources to identify and collect all the required content. This means obtaining different functional organizations' ideas of a product, resolving their differences, and presenting a unified view.** Secondarily, I need to have confidence that I can identify with the target audience in order to create effective documentation from the raw data which I've gleaned. This is a real world description, not some idealistic cut and paste from engineering and marketing documents, fix the grammar and save as perfect documentation dream.

I generally feel that a good technical writer must become competent enough in the subject he or she is writing about to answer most questions about it. In the SME-documentation specialist system, the DS has a place to ask questions, but isn't ultimately responsible for the content.

The biggest problem that I see is when an SME doesn't have a vested interest in the user and doesn't take the time to understand the user's documentation and learning needs. When the SME is an engineer or scientist, he or she is too busy creating the widget. But this system succeeds when the SME is in marketing and understands that his or her success or failure depends on the customer's success or failure.

**Any good TW knows that his or her understanding of cross-departmental viewpoints somehow is really valuable to the organization. If anyone in upper management realized this too, I think that TW's organizational roles could be elevated.

If I knew then what I know now...

2008-04-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

This is 1/10th a test if trackbacks work, but mostly a comment...

Tom asks the age old question, would you keep doing what you're doing, or do something else. Well I sort of intended to be a tech writer from college...

So the funny thing is I don't specifically enjoy writing, but I'm good at it. I realized this in college as an engineering major. Because in those days, putting in hours of required studying wasn't my strong suit, but my passion for techie stuff was, I put these two things (engineering + writing) together and got a writing oriented degree, with the intent of using it in the technology field.

Do most people go into their college studies all idealistic and truly want their career to orient itself around their decided major? I don't know - but I did. Would I like to be a full time engineer now? Heh, I don't know about full time, but it's fun to put down your pencil and pick up a development environment application.

I've flirted with the idea of other vocations: law (but I don't want to deal with lawyers), teaching (but I like working alone), ISD (same as teaching). These are all in the create or communicate sphere, so I don't know if I'm going so far out on a limb as an oceanographer. OH yeah - I'd like to be a green contractor, but that community is so old-boy network around here, the thought of it turns me off.

Would I mind being a TW in 20 years, writing manuals? Maybe not! It's hard to say, but as long as the technology I write about is engaging, there's a good possibility I will be.

extra wide

2008-04-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

What kind of display do you have at work and at home? I find these ergonomics fascinating, since your monitor is akin on the wheels on your car or your stereo's speakers; it's the main interface between the machine and what the machine works against.

At home I share 1 13" laptop. The screen a little bit small but fine for its intended purpose. I will say that if you're in the market for a laptop that you will use for more than Office-type or web browsing applications, splurge and get it with a screen that has a decent off-axis viewing angle. We watch a lot of DVDs on the laptop, and it's narrow viewing angle is limiting.

At home I also have a beautiful 21" trinitron CRT display for my desktops. What more can I say, this is what I was pining over 10 years ago. Accurate, bright colors, with detailed resolution. Plus it doesn't have to deal with the ClearView-type font dithering that most LCDs are sensitive to. The only downside is that it sucks about 120 watts of power and is HUGE.

Finally, my work displays. I started with a 19" Viewsonic CRT - Fabulous monitor. Then moved to a 17" LCD, this was a step backwards because of the reduced resolution, and as I recall, going from a curved screen to a flat screen was a little funky on my eyes for the first few days. I also remember that the LCD screen was too bright. This made it a little bit difficult working in a dim environment because the screen was blaring in your face. Next came an upgrade to a 19" LCD. Now we hit the sweet spot! The 19" had a fine amount of resolution (2 documents side by side in Frame), good color accuracy, and showed precise text once I got the hang of Clearview. I was happy.

But wait - so then the paradigm shifts when I got a 24" HUUUGE wide screen LCD display at work. At first I was blown away - our home TV is 19", and this screen feels much larger than my 21" CRT. I'm going to make this long story short:
For the way I work, a widescreen is overkill. I work very linearly, I don't need to see or refer to 5-10 different pieces of information at once. I generally write a document straight through, edit images one at a time. There are few dynamic dependencies. I'll contrast this with when I was coding or designing websites, where you need to refer to several windows of information at once.

The split screen feature in MS word is great for viewing two parts of a document simultaneously, but that's the most I've ever needed. Now I can have 2 frame documents side by side, but at almost 100% for each. This is nice, but unnecessary. Further, there's the potential to have too much visual information, such that it can be distracting.

Do any other TWs out there use wide screen or multiple monitor set ups effectively, for the TWing part of their job? I can see for content management or designing a help system, it could be useful, but for the straight task of writing and editing text, I'm completely unconvinced.

long time

2008-04-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

It's been about a year and a half since I've posted here, and the world of tech writing blogs has not grown too much bigger. I still lament that most tech-writing discussion centers on the tools of the trade, rather than the craft of the trade. But maybe this time around I'll have something interesting to chat about.

Thought of the day

2006-09-14T06:33:00.000-07:00

Publishing and Technical Writing are two separate fields. The notion of a documentation department probably creates the needed umbrella for the two fields. It is my belief that you probably only have enough time to engage in either of the sides of documentation. Unfortunately, I believe that many corporations push their workers toward wearing both hats.

As an example, I'm on a Framemaker listserv. I'm not sure why I joined exactly, but I've learned a lot. As someone who really loves technical writing, the difference becomes stark when the contributors to the list get all excited about getting Framemaker to make their lives easier - making the publishing aspect of the company's documentation needs accurate and efficient. Personally I'd rather concentrate on writing great docs - I'd publish to a .txt file if need be!

technical+writing technical+writer documentation Framemaker publishing

poor facebook

2006-09-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I have never viewed or belonged to facebook.com.F or those who know, correct my errors, but facebook is similar to myspace (and livejournal), i.e. a social networking site.

Facebook is getting hammered by a select set of critics charging that they are releasing person information about members. In actually it seems that Facebook has implemented RSS/whatever feeds of each friend-type user's page, such that any subscriber to the feed can easily view (or be alerted?) of page updates. (I think that the feed is placed directly on a user's home page… much like LJ friend’s lists)

Now presumably Facebook, with its .edu bent, attracts a wide range of users, not necessarily the Internet elite. The Internet elite, heralding all things web 2.0, love when you can add technologies on top of each other to make for a more connected and collaborative online world. News feeds are one of these tools. So I find it funny that the implementation of a tool, which in the abstract can only do good, is being resisted so fervently by the rest of us. (OK, i gotta say, I probably fall into the category of Internet elite)

Only speculating, but the real error here is that the developers and product managers at Facebook were probably too personally involved in the web 2.0 scene to step back and think for a second that their user base wasn't.

survey: favorite technical writing task

2006-07-31T06:58:00.000-07:00

I have a simple monday morning question to pose to all the technical writers out there:

What is your favorite task or thing about being a tech writer? We take on 1000 roles, and going from idea for a document to a stack of papers (or file) in a user's hand requires many discrete steps. Which is your favorite step?

Tech Tags: technical writing technical writer documentation work fulfillment best+parts

2006-07-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

Woo, a pretty cool article entitled "Tech Writing in the Age of Open Source" on reallylinux.com. Overall a good read, and I'd like to comment on a few of Mark Rais's words.

1. The Reader Feedback Loop. I believe that all TWs want user feedback. We want to make our work that much better, and the only way to learn how to improve is to elicit reader feedback. What Rais fails to realize is that in business and non-personally-motivated communities, most users are likely to grumble and move on after experiencing poor documentation. They aren't paid enough to share what they think.

2&3. This is based on the assumption that your organization delivers its documentation primarily via the web. In all of my experience, this has not been the case. Maybe it's different for other people.

4. Lots of points here:

Timing over perfection. I agree 100%, although Rais fails to realize that if you produce imperfect, technically inaccurate and misleading documents, your company can be held legally libel. OSS escapes this challenge.
"Although this emphasis on 'exceptional grammatical quality' may be a worthy trait, it is a worthless cause." I could not agree with this more. Good grammar is important, but devote a worthy amount of time to it, please! I think after years in the biz, we learn how to write in a quick, streamlined manner that gets around most grammatical challenges.
Honestly, TW projects usually lag behind the software development projects by a week or two at most. If this lag can be accepted (which I think it can in any context), I think that the timing issue isn't really so important. I’ve never seen documents lagging behind the software by months…
I don't know about this active voice nonsense, I really don't. All of my life I was taught that active is stronger than passive, and it certainly makes sense to me. Is Mr. Rais confusing person and voice, when he discusses what a global audience requires? Certainly globalized English is important to know. Does anyone out there have any tips on how to write this way?

technical writing, technical writer, documentation, OSS, linux

hrm

2006-07-03T13:30:00.000-07:00

I kind of jumped into Web2.0's blogging scene way too fast and never researched anything. So lets see if something like this, including tags, actually draws traffic to semicolon. :)

back in the day

2006-06-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

Charlie Brooker doesn't get it. You see his story sounds much like mine, being a part of the burgeoning wave of the Internet’s Geekdom-as-cool that rose from the mid/late-90s through the bubble bursting. But now Mr Brooker seems to feel disconnected from the latest Internet Thing.

Here's what happened: The Internet, as communication medium, is fully part of the fabric of society. The Internet isn't getting there, it isn't new and hip, it is now an institution. A popular site like myspace is now a mass-culture phenomenon. And like everything before it, the younger generations' trends are what's hip.

It's the same thing as his disdain for the term blogsphere. We can safely say that blogs were the domain of the geeky a few years back, but now anyone who wants a voice can participate. The price of admission was knowing the technology. But as the general level of technological aptitude is so much higher than it was 10 years ago, anyone can join in the fun. Thus the blogsphere isn't the geek's domain.

I think it's hard for those who feel they contributed to the rise of the web to be less visible online; the pioneers' strong voices have been drowned out. You used to visit websites and most of them were created by people similar to you, geeky types. But now, with everyone able to publish online, it's like you're walking down a crowded city street.

correction

2006-06-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

I'm sure it has happened to you - you've written and released chapters and pages and volumes, and realized that you got it wrong. I don't mean the actual explanations on a page, but let's say - the organization of your document. (I don't think it's just me)

Because we're not the SMEs, or the users, or we're not the experienced user, there's definitely a learning process the TW goes through when absorbing and spitting out information. When you're documenting some really REALLY big system or process, I think it takes a while, hundreds of hours perhaps, to distill all the information you're tasked to document. The only times where I think this isn't the case are when you either aren't documenting an ultra-complex topic, or if you have a brilliant teacher - and come on, most engineers aren't brilliant teachers.

So I pose this question to you, my loyal readers (technorati says my audience is the #1051076th popular blog, so that's a lot of you):

When realizing your information could be better organized, do you change the organization in your documents? Do you think that this will confused your readers or catch them off guard?

I personally have no qualms about changing things around. Computer hardware/software users are used to constant updates of their software, and chasing the new [technologies], so changing documentation (not contradicting yourself) simply follows the paradigm.

Obviously you don't want to make constant, radical changes. And I'll add the caveat that your text should be highly searchable or contain a usable index, so when the user's expectations fail, they can fall back on a solid means of finding what they need. And obviously, major reorganizations should be minimized. If you constantly find yourself doing this, something is wrong.

javascript be gone

2006-06-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest gripe based on 3 experiences. It's highly annoying when developers create feature-rich web-based email clients that try to mock MS outlook.

Why does this bother me?

Because in an attempt to create all the UI niceties, the applications are encumbered by A LOT of client-side javascript. Now that's all well and good, but these applications bring my older-than-6-months PCs to a grinding halt!! This is javascript abuse! Granted my computers at home are each about 5 years old (a 1.2 GHz Athlon-based PC, and a 466 MHz G4 mac).

The three examples:

company's intranet CMS system
Yahoo! Mail beta
Windows Live Mail beta (hotmail++ if you will)

These applications are beautiful and provide a great user experience with plenty of immediate and well-thought out visual feedback, but they bring my two home systems to a grinding halt. I'd probably see a performance gain if these email clients were deployed as Java applications.

So I'll leave the web-developers with this: don't abuse javascript, keep in mind that not everyone has a PC built in the past 2 years.

searching...

2006-06-09T12:49:00.000-07:00

I have another gripe about desktop applications. Ok, maybe not a gripe, but a feature that would really make me happy:

In Adobe Acrobat especially, I wish you could search for term XXXX, that appears around term YYYY.

What I'm really asking for is that programs such as Acrobat (or Word, or whatever), have some kind of smart indexing. It seems to me that you could wrangle some sort of identifier of vicinity of two search terms. If the two terms you are searching for have a very close vicinity, you score a hit. I wonder if Google has any level of searching that works in that way.

documenting the biggest and baddest toys

2006-06-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

The owners manual for the new 2007 Mercedes Benz S-class is 700 pages long, according to the NYT . All reality aside, you've got to admit that would be serious fun to write.
Imagine, having the engineer at your call explaining the 5000 point seat adjustments to you, and you have to write the docs in such a way to make the buyer feel like they got the $100k worth.

No sarcasm here. That would be fun as hell.

microsoft, my hero

2006-05-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

I think that on some levels, MS Outlook is MS's best product, judged by the features and high level of usability. Unfortunately for them, google has raised the bar really high. I'm talking about one feature in specific - the search function. I don't know how many of you use Google Desktop search (yes, I'm aware of all the security issues), but it is fabulous. Google gives you a really fast and accurate search tool for Outlook messages.

gmail is the same - the search function is fast and accurate. By comparison, when you use the built in search tool for outlook, it takes forever to search, and the results are questionable. MS should spend their billions and make the search function (in outlook, and systemwide) a real centerpiece of their user-centric applications. For yes, we are at that point when there's too much data to keep track of in our brains.

technical writer value and attention

2006-05-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Ooooh, look, I have an idea about Technical Writing in graph form. This looks like those economics graphics that explain a behavior, not the science graphs that have an independent and dependent variable. (click the graph to see it un-resized)

Here are my ideas -

1. The Red Line approximates the ideal situation for learning. Effective learning thought documentation CAN happen when the topic's complexity is proportional to the user's knowledge about the topic.

2. The further you are from the red line, the harder it is for documentation to add any value to the knowledge transfer. (Above the line, and the user ignores the docs, below the line and the docs can’t respond to the user’s needs)

As far as the technical writer is concerned:

3. The less complex a topic, the more user hand-holding is required. Your writing has to really be attentive to the user's needs to get him/her up to speed.

At some point in the middle of the red line, the user transitions from a beginner to an intermediate or advanced user. This transition signifies when you as the writer can place more emphasis on the topic, and less emphasis on metaphor and explanations.

4. The Blue Box represents the technical writing sweet spot. I define the sweet spot as the point on the graph where

The tech writer can provide the most value to the knowledge transfer.
The tech writer experiences the greatest challenge (and hopefully reward) for his or her work.

When you are outside of this box, you are either creating ultra-boring documentation or high-level documentation that’s probably best left for an expert to write and an editor to tighten.

Thoughts, comments?

Technical Writing Rule #13

2006-04-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

another in a series of rules that all technical writes must know

Engineers are wrong, a lot of the time. Don't assume that what they tell you is truth UNLESS they are the primary person responsible for the discrete piece of code or equipment you are inquiring on.

A really good technical writer will know the system to be documented holistically, and should be able to notice all inconsistencies.

action or subject

2006-04-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

Pretend you are a user for a second, and not the technical writer. When you read a manual, do you, personally, want an action/task or subject oriented arrangement?

Over and over it is drilled into our little TW heads that everything should be action-oriented because the users are reading your prose to get something done for their job.

Maybe this is an overy-geeky opinion, maybe it's just me, but I don't think this is a fair assumption. I'm reading about a technology that I'm interested in and have background in. I don't really want someone to tell me how to do my job, I want someone to tell me the theory, all pitfalls noted and let me piece together my own procedure.

I can't be all alone here.

value vs reality!

2006-04-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

via C-Net's article about Nicholas Negroponte's commentary re: ongoing $100 Laptop for developing nations:

Once children have the laptops, they'll teach themselves, he predicted, making teacher training beside the point. "Teachers teach the kids? Give me a break," he said. "Give any kid an electronic game and the first thing they do is throw away the manual and the second thing they do is use it."

he's right, you know...

The Least Appreciated Mentality

2006-04-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

Many of us in the technical communications field approach our work with a chip on our shoulders. The prevailing attitude is that of constantly trying to prove our work's worth. It's the classic: "the manual is important, no really, it is!" sentiment.

Well of course it is, and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. Period, end of story. If you ask any executive or (real) engineering manager what their opinion is of technical documentation, they would probably reply that it’s just one of the necessary steps involved in creating a solid software/hardware product.

But why does the technical communicator live his or her life in constant fear that no one gives a shit about the great documents he or she writes? I have come up with 6 reasons why so many technical writers are defensive about the value of their work. Feel free to add or criticize.

Unsung hero - It's a certain kind of person who is comfortable with doing a task and not getting much credit. You really need to be of this temperament. After all, the developers of software/hardware are most prominently seen as the primary creators, and even before that it's product management who takes all the credit. I think for this, and so many other analogies, Technical Writers fall into the same category as the QA team. In fact, the TW's role is more visible than a QA person's role in product development. But at the end of the day, both must know to themselves that their work is crucial in delivering that high-quality product.
False Truth – It’s common to say that no one reads the manual. But, we all know this isn't true. People just don't refer to documentation first. More pointedly, they don't read the manual as they read a book. People refer to the manual for the singular task they need help with. That's all it takes for your writing to return value.
Low Positive Feedback - What do you want, a cookie? Seriously, no feedback is a good thing. People are more apt to tell you what they think when something is wrong, not when it's right. That's a constant in life actually. If you want positive feedback, go into some customer-service oriented field.
Content is King - This is a controversial one, but the more specialized the field, the more often it is that the manual does not get the resources or time to include all of the necessary information. TWs put their efforts into things other than the content, like layout and design. The end result is that the information a user requires is missing or insufficient. When problems like this surface, they enforce the notion that the manual is crap.
Nitpicking Users / High Negative Feedback - Everyone is a critic, and it’s easy for people to attack what's missing and what's wrong. After all, everyone took a composition class in college, so just about ever reader has some basis for critiquing your work. OTOH, you probably can't fire back at a colleague's work because you don't know a thing about RTOS design. It's annoying, and raising the ire of a technical writer often opens the engineer up to a relentless critique of their comma usage in emails and design docs. Don't go down this path :)
Self Evident software - Since GUI based software is the norm these days, more times than not, it's easy to figure out the basics of an application. For a good number of tasks, documentation isn't quite necessary, it's more of a formality. And since we start at the beginning, our first work is less valued than nailing down the details.

why i can't know everything anymore

2006-03-30T09:54:00.000-08:00

I had an idea on the drive home that hints at my answer to Jeff Carr's question, "As technical writers, it seems we too often settle for being generalists. Perhaps we need to specialize more. What do you think??"

I was thinking about my interests in general and how these days it's really hard to keep up with the latest news and ideas about anything. When I was younger, lets mark this at the early days of the WWW, I was into a lot of different things. I still find the same topics interesting to this day: computers, music, technology, hard physical sciences, media, pop culture, the list goes on and on...

I loved to know a lot about a lot.

Fast forward 5-10 years, the present. I find it very hard to keep up with everything today, primarily because of how many people are engaged in the scene surrounding a unique focus. It's not necessarily the huge number of people, but that they are all connected via the Internet. Instantaneous knowledge transfer coupled with access for everyone who wants it is overwhelming us.

Because everyone can easily be an expert, i.e. the price of admission is an Internet connection, and you have to know more knowledge about a focus to feel merely competent, the bar has been raised for entry into the “I know a few things about X, Y, Z club.” Democratization of becoming knowledgeable in a focus also means that you are competing with endless numbers of experts, knowledgeable people, or even neophytes.

So I decided that even though it's hard, I have to reduce my interests these days because the time commitment required to being marginally involved in numerous focus scenes (even as a pure consumer) of information and knowledge would take up more hours of the day than exist. Keep in mind that I am married, and have my first child on the way!

Therefore, I think it is nearly impossible to be a generalist anymore. You could specialize your generality, but now I'm just playing rhetorical games :)

To tie this in, luckily when you go to work, the expectation is that you can handle a single job. But I think if you approach technical writing as a generalist, someone who can work in half a dozen fields, you will usually be passed over because someone out there has invested themselves more fully in a specialization than you have, whether by choice or luck.

In reality of course, a worker is also hired based on price, overall experience, ability to get along with the team, and a host of other criteria that have been around since the cube was invented. BUT, I don't think you should ever underestimate what a deciding factor specialized knowledge is when applying for a job.

I strongly believe that in some ways having a generalist's sense is a highly laudable technical writer attribute, but the speed at which business moves today mostly rewards "hit the ground running" ability over "grow with the company" ability.

comp sci 101

2006-03-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me how important it is for a technical writer who works in the software arena to have experience with pseudocode. Not insomuch as you'd actually have to write your documentation with a description of the process in a psuedocode manner, but the advantage is that when you have the basic understanding of how applications step through logic, you're better poised to explain every detail to your audience.

It's fun when you get to piece together and interleave this hard logic with a matter-of-fact tone in your writing.

Technical Writing Rule #24

2006-03-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

Just because one Engineer says "it makes sense," doesn't mean it objectively makes sense to all people who understand standard written English.

Alternatively: If the author does not understand why something is accurate, then it's not accurate.

what do you do?

2006-03-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

I'd like to post something and see what kind of agreement there is (that is if anyone is reading this).

In my mind, when you actually care, there are 3 discrete technical communication jobs:

Technical Writer
Technical Editor
Documentation [Expert, Specialist, whathaveyou]

Here's my definition of the tasks that fall under the purview of each title:

TW: Culling from design and planning documents, interviewing engineers / developers / marketers, and first hand use of the product, this person creates the documentation that accompanies the product as it goes to market. The technical writer’s main task is similar to the age-old assignment of writing a book report or essay; a topic is researched, learned, and then presented in the best possible format to communicate the issues to the reader. To me, the core value and skill a great technical writer brings to the table is knowing how to tailor a report/paper/procedures for the right audience.

TE: There's so much overlap between a technical writer and editor that the lines are very blurry. Ideally the TE assumes the standard editing functions such as ensuring clear and consistent style, visually, grammatically, mechanically, and substantively. Ideally (again), one can only become a TE after they have spent years as a TW. Only by gaining enough writing experience, would one be at the point where he or she can edit with authority.

On the other hand, it's feasible to understand the topics less than an expert, but still maintain the knowledge required to determine if the needs and style of the documentation is correct.

In a newsroom, you probably don't get to be an editor before you're the reporter. It's the same thing here.

It's my belief that a lot of TWs tend toward the editing side of things.

Documentation Specialist: Technically speaking, a documentation person is mostly concerned with managing documentation. These days, the job encompasses documentation organization, content reusability, and content delivery. This person rarely creates their own documentation; the documentation specialist is somewhat of a content broker.

Someone who is one with Frame maker for instance is a documentation specialist. This person probably spends the majority of their time writing frame scripts, tweaking styles, and setting up EDDs and other XMLy items. He or she has a keen eye for output to .pdf, HTML, or application-based help systems. I had a job once with the title of Documentation Specialist, but really I was a technical writer. In fact, that was a US government DOT contract, and to my knowledge, Uncle Sam knows what a documentation specialist is, but does not know what a technical writer is.

There's a very clear delineation between TW/TE and a DS because a documentation person rarely gets his or her hands dirty with content.

In reality one person has to perform all of the above tasks. If we cared, we could title ourselves as technical communicators to indicate we perform all three tasks.

I'm sure that each of us has certain tasks that we really enjoy most and excel at. Certainly though, when technical writers get together and discuss problems, innovations, and other general shop talk, they focus on TE and DS tasks.

2005-12-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

Something just clicked...

The internet is filled with people sharing information on how to create and copy highly technical projects. These projects range from programming computers, to physical creations and hacks, like making backyard lightning bolts and putting a home PC in a toaster.

Several of these projects become their own genre (like the aforementioned putting X computer object inside of Y packaging), or taking manufacturer X's hardware, and replacing the software.

If you dig in further, community customs and mores start to appear. What I'm sure many of you have seen, is the classic case of the "noob" (aka newbie) asking for help and explanation. I think that it's kind of vile that so often, these people have to be self-effacing in order to get answers to their beginner questions.

There's a project I've been interested in implementing and completing at home. I've spent several hours researching and learning all the necessary hardware/software/configurations. Yet for all of my Internet searching, I never found a definitive overview of how to complete the project. It’s bullshit that I'd have to make yet another "HI I'M A NEWBIE SO BEAR WITH MY BASIC QUESTIONS" kind of post, especially because this isn't the case. At this point, I know my shit - you could just spell out the process without any details and I'll get it done. Period.

And that's the point where it hit me, that the whole phenomenon of people debasing themselves to learn something can only be blamed on the experts.

By and large, the “experts” can not document a full process clearly; they can only write very specific information in small disjointed parts. I could also place blame on the fact that there rarely seems to be a master editor for so much web-based documentation. This leads to people having a hard time learning the ins and outs of a far-reaching project.

One should be proud to be a newbie, embarking on a project. It is nothing to be ashamed of to ask questions when the teacher did a poor job of explaining something.

(This is of course the argument why books are still relevant when all the raw information is available for free)

clock watching

2005-11-23T08:52:00.000-08:00

I have my dream job: working in Internet/networking/telecom field at a start up company that makes a really cool cutting edge product. I've had jobs that sucked before dealing with boring technology, so I'm in a good place right now.

I've always given myself to the idea that you really have to like your work. You sit in an office for 40+ hours a week, and with the driving time, it's almost more than half your life. There are others who just want a steady paycheck so they can make the most of the rest of their lives. and that's fine for them, but I can't understand it personally.

It makes things that much better when you are excited create or learn about your product.

Now of course there are slow times or boring busy work to get through, but when you complain about nearly all your tasks, something is wrong. Change jobs, position yourself to do something you like, but damn it, you're bring me and my kind down!

I always found it a little bit hard when making small talk with people and the topic of their job comes up. I'm a bit embarrassed to chime in "well I actually like going to work, we make a REALLY cool product.” It's just like in school when most kids would proclaim ‘school sucks, I'd rather be out.’ Well, half of the time I liked school!

This is a perennial argument, I know.

So yes, I like technical writing, and documenting software and hardware. And no, I just don’t do this by day.

Now I can’t speak for other fields, and lets keep this to tech stuff, but sometimes I feel that tech writers are especially guilty of not really having their hearts (or at least a portion of their hearts) in the core work of their job-getting some kind of information from a developer’s mind into a customer’s mind.

Some tech writers like the fact that they have a solid white collar paying job, some like to play editor and correct a poor engineer’s grammar (thereby saying nyah – you don’t know that much more than I do), and some like to layout and design documents. But I swear, I think the vast minority of TWs really don’t love the information transferal part of the job. There’s the aspect of the job where we play the content editor and disseminator, and I think few of us are fixated on that task.

YOU CAN'T USE A SEMICOLON THERE!

2005-11-16T06:03:00.000-08:00

At this point, I think my blog will explore the same dozen issues over and over. It may run its course and I'll be done with my thoughts after a set amount of time. But lets move on.

On of my biggest gripes about technical writers is the people who are grammar nazis. If you work in tech, or spend any time in any forum online, you know who I’m talking about - the people who get offended at the deepest levels, or act like you just punched their mother if you punctuate a sentence incorrectly.

Now there are some egregious punctuation errors out there. They are funny to read, and sad because the original author is showing off their ignorance. But come on - laugh at the person, shake your head, and then MOVE THE HELL ON.

The number one rule of writing is: if the person reading your prose understood what information you were trying to convey, then the text was a success in its first goal.

I don't understand it, it's like people feel that language is their domain and feel the need to belittle others when their mastery isn't on par. English (or whatever) as a language is freaking amazing in that it still works with highly imprecise input- unlike math or a programming language. IMHO, there are more important things to do with your passion and anger than correct an adult. Children are a different story :)

Believe me, I am a huge fan of terse and precise writing. However, it is not required, nor should it be fought over in realms outside of published textual media.

Good day

2005-11-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

and welcome to my blog.

While I have a great life in livejournal, and I just set up a website for my wife and forthcoming baby to discuss all family things, I wanted to keep a separate blog to discuss all things professional. For me, that profession is technical writing, specifically in the IT/software/telecom field.

So I'll rant about that, and the surrounding technologies.

Sounds like a fun time? I sure hope so.