Technical Communication As Story Telling

Over on his "I'd Rather Be Writing" blog, Tom Johnson, has taken my idea of Tech Comm as storytelling, and expanded on it an excellent post, that I highly recommend.

In particular I like these two ideas on the practicalities of applying story telling techniques to technical documentation:

THE ELEMENT OF CHANGE

In a good story, the resolution always brings about some type of change, or comes about because of change. If you listen to stories on The Moth podcast (a storytelling podcast), you’ll constantly hear this element of change near the end of each story. For a story to feel meaningful, the protagonist always changes as a result of the conflict. Without this element of change, the story feels flat.

In technical documentation, achieving that element of change is difficult. In almost all technical documentation, the reader is the protagonist, since our point of view is second person (“you”). You (the reader) have a problem. ..... Through the help topic’s steps and information, you find a solution that solves your problem. Hooray, you’re much happier and complete now. That’s the basic transformation.

And..

FOCUSING ON THE PROBLEM

A problem of some kind usually drives and gives rise to the story. But isn’t every help topic by default the answer to some problem? And aren’t users coming to the help content with a problem already in mind? Do we need to explicitly supply the problem, since it’s already apparent in the user’s mind?

Yes, your protagonist already has a problem. That problem is what is fueling his or her path through the help. But it can still be helpful to state the problem explicitly so that users can connect their problem to the solution you describe.

In many ways the examples and ideas that Tom cites, also feedback to my earlier post on Applying the 10 Commandments of Storytelling to Technical Documentation.

It's great to see these ideas being picked up and expanded upon.

Print or Digital ? - Using Augmented Reality to bridge the gap.

One of the the strangest aspects of all the recent discussions in the mainstream publishing world about the emergence of eBooks seems to be the notion that digital and print are mutually exclusive delivery options.

Nothing can be further than the truth; as we well know in the technical and corporate publishing world, electronic delivery of information is just one delivery option.

But how about combining the two? Print publications augmented by digital content?

Check out this video of a young reader's reaction to a copy of the BBC's science magazine, FOCUS, with augmented reality content.

Think about how effective that would be when used to deliver technical or training materials?

Perhaps Augmented Reality maybe just the thing to bridge that perceived gap between print and digital? Food for thought.

Where's The Manual?

Over the last couple of days my life in corporate and technical communications seems to have crossed over into my life as both a pop-culture writer, and motor racing fan.

While watching the advance press-screening of TOY STORY 3, I was delighted to discover that a central plot point revolved around the toys using the manual to discover how to effectively reboot Buzz Lightyear via his 'reset' button - of course, as they say, "hilarity ensues."

Then this morning I was pointed in the direction of this amusing video of McLaren Formula One team drivers, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, both World Champions, trying to build one of their race cars without the aid of their team. The plaintive cry of "Where's the manual?" made me smile.

But as much fun as it is to hear "manuals" used and talked about like this, it made me think about a more serious take.

I still keep hearing people in the technical communications industry say they aren't valued, that what they do has no place in a hi-tech digital world. Well it doesn't come much more hi-tech than Formula One, or digital than Pixar, but still the idea of, and need for, a "manual" is paramount.

In both cases, the toys, and the drivers, wanted to know how to do something.

And that's where the future of technical communications lies. It doesn't matter what form the "manual" may be, now or in the future; we have the skills to provide the best answers to the question "How?"

Now, that's real value...

Just ask Buzz or the McLaren F1 team.

What's Your Frame of Reference?

I spent a large part of this last weekend attending various sessions at the annual "It's My Heart" conference on Congenital Heart Defects (my youngest daughter is a CHD survivor - and she and her mother are very active in trying to raise CHD awareness).

As the majority of the sessions were hosted by various members of the medical profession, I expected them to be freely peppered with jargon (see my last post), but what really caught my attention was the frequent referencing of names and research to an audience, that, no matter how educated they had made themselves on various aspects of CHD, could not follow the point being made.

This group of medical professionals knew they would be speaking to an audience of lay-people whose own experiences lay outside those of the medical staff they interact with on a day-to-day basis; but no adjustment was made to accommodate that.

The first rule of any sort of communication is know your audience and adjust as necessary. While the various surgeons did explain a lot of technical information, references to other supporting material and research remained obscure.

This made me think about my own techniques when presenting. My public speaking tends to fall into two camps, the corporate communications world, and the creative side of pop-culture. I know I often make pop-culture references when I talk about corporate communications, but now I wonder am I assuming too much that my audience will understand them?

Adjusting for the audience is not just about vocabulary and jargon, it's also about adjusting your own frame of reference.

Enter The Jargon!!

Whenever I am teaching a course on the philosophy and techniques of writing using Plain Language, or a Controlled language, such as Simplified Technical English, one of the "rules" that I most often quote and emphasize is:

"Avoid the use of industry jargon."

It seems a logical and obvious piece of advice, and not one I'd given much additional thought to, until asked the question, "what do you mean by jargon?" My immediate answer was "terms used exclusively within your industry that wouldn't be understood by people outside of it."

But over the last few weeks I've begun to question my own answer.

Webster's dictionary defines jargon as " the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group," which seems to fit with my original answer. But how do you define that group, and where are its boundaries? When does jargon become acceptable?

Think about the number of technical terms that are now part of everyday conversation - 'download,' 'upgrade,' etc. Do they still count as computer industry jargon?

What started me down this line of thought was working on my current book project about Wikis. While at the recent STC Summit in Dallas I used the word "wiki" without a second thought. It's a word well understood in that community, and I guess it could be considered industry jargon.

But outside of that group I find that when I talk about my book to a much broader audience there is a high percentage of people who know what a wiki is and can explain it quite succinctly. There are also still a sizable proportion who give me a blank stare until I say 'Wikipedia." A few days ago a writer friend of mine posted on his blog that he had being doing some research on "the wiki." He, of course, meant he had been using Wikipedia, just one (extreme) example of a wiki implementation.

But his use of a generic term for the technology made me wonder, is the word wiki moving away from jargon to becoming mainstream. If it is - what does this mean for professional communicators trying to avoid the use of jargon. Is what we consider jargon a label that is only proportional to the size of the community that accepts and understands a specific definition of a word? The smaller the community, the higher a word's potential "jargon" rating?

New Book Project: THE CONTENT POOL

Contracts are signed so can now announce that I will be writing another book for XML Press - "THE CONTENT POOL" will be published in 2011.

So what is "THE CONTENT POOL" about?

THE CONTENT POOL
How to Identify, Organize, Manage, and Leverage Your Company's Largest Hidden Asset.

Every company, no matter what industry they are in, or product or service they create, do four basic things. Offer something for sale, sell it, collect the money for it and create content about what they do. Product development, Marketing, Sales and Finance are all recognized as essential to the organization and are often reflected by VP or CXO level responsibility, yet a company's content, which contains all of its intellectual property, is often overlooked. Whether they realize it or not every company's secondary role is that of being a publisher. This book will aim to place content creation, management and distribution on a par with other core strategic business activities.

Identifying, organizing, managing and leveraging your content properly can make you money.

The book will take a look at:
- Why every company is a publisher.
- What content do you produce now and how do you use it.
- Identifying the audience, today and in the future.
- What about the language you use - is it costing you money or even making you legally liable?
- Content development silos - gain through collaboration.
- How Consistency saves you money.
- Where are your pain points?
- Styes and Standards
- Rewrite and reuse.
- It's about answers not the documentation.
- Your customers will add value to your content
- Technology comes last.
- Your content can be a revenue source.
- Good content wins customers
- Helpful content reduces support costs.
- Develop a Content Strategy.

The book will conclude with - The Case for having a CCO (Chief Content Officer).

STC 2010 - A short walk from history.

For the first time in many years I wasn't chained to a vendors booth during the STC Summit, which meant as well as presenting, I could actually take time to sit in on many other sessions, and have lengthy hallway (and coffee shop) conversations.

What struck me about this year's Summit was how upbeat it felt in contrast to recent years. There was, at least to me, a definite feeling that the STC, and the industry itself, had weathered a crisis and was heading in the right direction. Yes there are still challenges to face, but there is definite light at the end of the tunnel.

There was less talk this year about jumping on to the latest production technology fad, and a lot more about considering our audience and answering their needs. As Anne Gentle put it during one panel, "it's about answers, not about documentation."

[Although one technology fad that was pretty much a constant - was the use of Twitter - used as both a communications tool and a way to post notes and ideas from sessions it added another valuable layer to the conference experience.]

I was also pleased to see that on the whole the attendees realized that as the industry is changing, so they need to. There were very few with the crossed-arms defensive "I am a technical writer" posture; most of the people I spoke to, and the audiences in the sessions I attended, realized that this is the perfect time to make yourself even more valuable by adding new skills and re-evaluating and realigning your role. Be it Information Architect, Community Manager, User Experience Designer, Multi-Media Producer, or something else, there is great opportunity out there for skilled and open minded technical communicators.

Each time I visited the expo floor it seemed busy, and all the vendors I spoke to were very happy with both the constant traffic flow and the questions they were being asked.

When I set out for the conference I had delusions that I would get an hour or so each evening to sit in my hotel room and write - it didn't happen. Literally from breakfast at 7:00am to crashing at 11:00pm each night, it was pretty much constant conversation and learning. All the presentations I attended were excellent and the two panels I participated in were great fun. I know the panel format was a bit of an experiment this year, but I hope that it returns for future conferences.

The conference was held at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas, and was just a couple of blocks from the infamous Dealy Plaza, site of the Kennedy assassination. (in fact I could see the plaza from my hotel room - see photo above.) Hence my title about being a short walk from history. But I also believe that the profession itself is now also a short walk away from its own history. It faced a crisis over the last 12 months that it has endured and come through, and we are now on the first steps of a new direction. What direction that new history takes, will be up to us as a profession, and us as individuals, as to how we adapt and embrace the new challenges awaiting us.

Wow this looks cool - but hang on a minute...

The first time I saw this video from the folks at TIME Inc. on the possible future of their glossy magazines (in this case Sports Illustrated), I thought - Wow, they get it. Someone has at last seen the real potential of using digital content.



But the more I watched it, two things suddenly occurred to me.

1. While the flashy interface may look cool, it is still very much a paper based paradigm with a page-based sensibility. - Now I accept that jumping straight from physical paper limitations to the theoretical infinite canvas of a digital world may not be acceptable for the consumer market, and this sort of screen bounded design maybe the best solution to manage that transition.
2. The text is still being considered as a design feature and a lump of fixed content. There doesn't appear to be any mark-up used to make the text intelligent. Where are the hyper-links in the articles? Consider an SI article that on the mention of an athlete's or team's name lets you pull up a library of photos and past articles from the SI archive. Or links to apps that let you build your own performance statistics. How about a link to a virtual tour of a stadium? Or an audio clip of a classic piece of commentary.? Why not the ability to search the text, and order your results the way you want them?

While the surface results of this mock-up look amazing, underneath it is still bound in many ways by thinking of the publication as the product and not the delivery of intelligent content as a portal to adding value.

Times They Are A Changin' But Most Publishers Aren't

A few days ago I saw a job posting from the publishers of my first book, who were looking for an editor for one of their imprints. What caught my eye was that the posting emphasized that the new editor should have experience and skills in using the same software that had been used to produce my book. A book that was published in 1997 – thirteen years ago!
Technology has changed a lot in thirteen years and so has the way that content can be created, handled and made ready for publication. But this publisher is far from being alone in sticking with old processes. My experiences working on other book projects in the last few years have just reinforced my belief that the vast majority of the traditional publishing market still works around a production system designed to do one thing – move paper.

A process that, despite changes in tools, has changed little since the dawn of the printing press.

You can read the rest of my article on using XML in Publishing at THE CONTENT WRANGLER

Writing Technical Comics

My article on "Writing Technical Comics" was selected as the lead feature article for this month's issue of the STC magazine, INTERCOM.



It is now available as a free download by clicking HERE.