survey: favorite technical writing task

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

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

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. :)

Tags: technical writing, technical writer, documentation, engineering, VoIP, framemaker, visio, networking, IP

back in the day

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

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

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...

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.

OK
OJ
Oak
Oik
KO
Edit...
Ignore all
Add to dictionary

documenting the biggest and baddest toys

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.