The Blockhead Blog

User Documentation Survey 2008

2008-11-16T23:08:00.004Z

Every so often I launch a survey about user documentation - sometimes it's specifically for a conference paper, and sometimes it's just as a small contribution to the growing body of knowledge in technical communications.
This time I have included three groups of questions: questions for people who create user documentation, questions for people who create technology products, and questions for the most important group of people of all - people who use technology products.
I am launching this survey as an open survey on the internet, and so I know any results will only be indicative, rather than representative of a particular group of users. However I do hope as many people as possible will take part.
I plan to publish the results in the first quarter of 2009, and because I have data from previous surveys (going back to 1999) I may be able to show some trends, particularly in terms of what kinds of documents are being produced.
Please take a few minutes to complete the survey - thank you.

World Usability Day

2008-11-12T16:03:00.003Z

I just wanted to post a reminder that Thursday 13th November 2008 is World Usability Day. If you're not sure what "usability" means, ask yourself this - why (to paraphrase a comment on the World Usability Day website) is a mobile phone more difficult to use than a door handle ?
Usability means making technology products easy to use, which in turn means designing products with the users' point of view in mind. That applies both to physical products, like mobile phones, and virtual products like computer software. Generally speaking, there is a tendency for the external design of technology products to reveal much too much of the inner workings of the product, which, although necessary, admirable, and often brilliant, are irrelevant to what the user needs to use the product for. I don't know of anyone who uses a hammer for knocking in nails who is particularly interested in the temperature of the furnace in which the hammer's head was forged. It may be interesting to someone, and it's certainly interesting for the manufacturer, but it's not relevant to the everyday tasks the hammer is used for. Unfortunately, irrelevant "furnace temperature" information abounds in the user literature for technology products.
I could go on about usability, and its general absence, for a long time. It's sad but true, but even the very finest user documentation can't compensate for a product that was designed without any consideration for its usability.

Follow the links for more on World Usability Day, and in particular on events in the UK.

Challenging linguistic theory isn't funny enough

2008-11-10T17:30:00.005Z

One of the good things about science, is that it always knows it might be wrong. According to Karl Popper, a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. New evidence can and should displace a prevailing theory, until the point at which even newer evidence emerges.
Linguists, for example, used to believe that language was culturally determined, and then along came Chomsky who presented evidence that it was an innate, genetically determined faculty. To borrow an analogy from Steven Pinker, humans have a language ability in the same way that spiders have a web-spinning ability.
While most of the broadcast and print media (such as the Telegraph)were widely reporting a "a list of the most irritating cliches" this weekend, taken from a new book about the English language, the really interesting item for linguists and language afficionados was hidden away elsewhere. On Saturday morning's travel programme "Excess Baggage" on BBC Radio 4, linguist Dan Everett was talking about his experiences with the Piraha people of the Amazon. If Everett is right, and the Piraha language does indeed lack some of the universal innate features that Chomsky ascribed to all languages, then perhaps it's time to review the prevailing theories in the light of the evidence. In academic circles, the debate about Everett's work had been going on for several years. But "at the end of the day" it's simply not entertaining - too much like "rocket science" I suppose.

Congratulations, Mr. Obama, Congratulations, USA.

2008-11-09T18:55:00.003Z

I don't normally comment on politics, but this week has been exceptional. If I had been a US citizen last Tuesday I would probably have voted for Obama, but that is hardly unexpected, given that I am a university-educated, white, middle-class liberal with a white-collar job, living in a major urban centre.

From a professional point of view, I admire Obama's command of the English language. Courses on public speaking and writing to persuade can now use his speeches as exemplars of good practice. I was amused, and perhaps a little scared, by the attempt of the Republican Party to use "he's eloquent" as an insult.

In today's Independent on Sunday there is an analysis by Dr Max Atkinson on Obama's use of classical oratorical techniques particularly the three-part list, as in his victory speech:

"Is there anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible;
who still wonders if the dream of our fathers is alive in our time;
who still questions the power of our democracy?"

[I haven't found this in the online edition of the paper, unfortunately.]

Another interesting aspect of Obama's campaign is the way he embraced technology not only to reach voters but to raise funds. I was going to comment on this, but I don't need to, as Conrad Taylor has already written an interesting article on his blog on the way the Obama team used online networking to raise money.

Documentation standards? Who needs them?

2008-10-26T11:12:00.007Z

A document called "BS ISO/IEC 26514:2008 Software and systems engineering: Requirements for designers and developers of user documentation" was published in June 2008, and is available from the BSI (though it's quite expensive to buy if you're an individual purchaser). The November 2008 edition of the STC's magazine Intercom focuses on standards in general and this new documentation standard in particular.

Now imagine this scenario: it's the documentation manager's cubicle in the development department of a medium-sized application software company. The VP of software development appears and asks the documentation manager this question: "Do you and your team have everything you need to make sure that our practices and procedures are compliant with the current ISO standard for user documentation?"

For most people involved in developing user documentation, the next scene would involve paramedics trying to resuscitate a documentation manager who had collapsed from shock.

The point I am trying to make with this lame attempt at humour is that with or without ISO standards, many small and medium sized organisations still regard user documentation as at best a marginal activity, or at worst as a necessary evil, and, especially in troubled economic times like these, as a cost centre that can and should be squeezed as much as possible. The idea that user documentation has any intrinsic value to a company, or that it is something important enough to be worthy of an international standard, is quite alien to many businesses.

I suspect that this sort of negative attitude towards user documentation is particularly prevalent here in the UK, where technical communications is hardly taught at all in higher education. (This may be because writing skills are not taught as a specific skill in secondary education in the UK, and instead are regarded as a key skill integrated across the whole curriculum - but that problem deserves a blog article of its own.) In the United States, in contrast, there are dozens of undergraduate and graduate programmes in technical communication, and there is also an expectation, absent from the UK HE sector, that engineering, computing and science undergraduates will all take at least one course in technical writing. But even in the USA, dismissive and derisory opinions of user documentation are still widespread.

I applaud the efforts being made by the STC in the United States to have the occupational designation of technical communicator recognised by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I hope that here in the UK the ISTC will continue its efforts to ensure similar recognition, even though that means addressing both EU and UK authorities.

I am delighted that this ISO standard has been published, as it is a recognition of the importance of what technical writers do, and it gives added public legitimacy to our profession. In particular, I am pleased with the approach taken by the standard, of endorsing a task-based and user-focused approach to user documentation. This ISO standard could become a significant tool in improving the status of the documentation function in many companies.

Who needs documentation standards? We all do.

A bit of a grumble

2008-10-14T11:00:00.004+01:00

It's happened to me so many times, I should be used to it by now, but I'm not. I meet people who are involved in product development, and when I try to talk to them about user documentation I get brushed-off with "It's OK, we do all our user documentation in-house." "That's great," I say, "how many technical writers do you have on staff?"
"Oh no," they reply, "we don't have any technical writers, the programmers (or the engineers, or whoever) do it themselves."
These are intelligent people, who wouldn't allow anyone other than an experienced and qualified accountant to prepare their company's balance sheet, or anyone other than a qualified and experienced lawyer to prepare their end-user licence agreement, but they'll happily entrust preparing their user documentation to someone without any relevant experience or qualifications!

Bad news for UGC from "Private Eye"

2008-10-05T10:43:00.007+01:00

User-generated content (UGC) is all the rage these days. It's at the heart of many social networking web sites, and is increasingly becoming monetized as well. For example, there are web sites where you can upload a video from your phone, and earn a very small amount of money each time someone else pays to download your video.

For people working in technical publications UGC presents a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, gathering feedback from real users is always valuable and helps build a user community (and from a commercial viewpoint builds customer loyalty as well).

On the other hand, companies have a degree of responsibility for goods they sell, and they therefore need to provide accurate and authoritative instructions and reference material. An open and unmoderated user forum or Wiki might not always be the best vehicle for providing that kind of information.

Many advocates of UGC in general, and of wikis in particular, are fond of claiming that over time the Wiki will always be right, because anyone who finds an error will correct it. To my mind this assumes a degree of altruism which might not always be present, and so should not really be relied on. Wikipedia for example may be a useful source, but only if it is used with the same degree of critical evaluation as any other source.

An interesting example of the way that Wikipedia might be misused and might inadvertently contribute to the perpetuation of false information comes from the current edition of Private Eye, the satirical British magazine (Private Eye, no. 1220, 3-16 Oct. 2008). In an attack on the sloppy research practices of one sports journalist on a national daily newspaper, Anatole Kaletsky includes the following story in his "Hackwatch" column:

IDLY sabotaging the user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia following the UEFA cup draw back in August, a user of the b3ta web forum going by the name of "godspants" made a few amendments to the entry for Cypriot team Omonia Nicosia.

He (or she) noted that they were sponsored by Natasha Kaplinsky, that their former players included Jean Claude Van Damme and Richard Clayderman, and claimed that "A small but loyal group of fans are lovingly called 'The Zany Ones' - they like to wear hats made from discarded shoes and have a song about a little potato." As you do.

Writing up his pre-match report on Omonia's match against Manchester City for the Daily Mirror on 18 September, sports hack David Anderson decided to do some in-depth research. Thus it was that Mirror readers were informed that City manager "Mark Hughes will not tolerate any slip-ups against the Cypriot side, whose fans are known as the 'Zany Ones' and wear hats made from shoes".

Brilliantly, by the rules of Wikipedia - which relies on "verifiablility - whether readers are able to check that material added has already been published by a reliable, third-party source" such as "mainstream newspapers" - this is now officially true.

This may just be an amusing story, and I don't know how the community of editors on Wikipedia will handle it. (They probably did not foresee that something that was clearly a spoof would be used so uncritically by someone from the mainstream media.) But I see this also as a warning against relying too heavily on any user generated content.

Good news for DITA from Edinburgh

2008-09-22T08:54:00.004+01:00

I have just returned from a trip to the European UA Conference which was held this year in Edinburgh. There were plenty of speakers who mentioned DITA, including one delegate who demonstrated how her company had developed a bespoke solution using DITA and a WordPress blog.
There was also a "fringe meeting" (if you hold a conference in Edinburgh you just have hold a fringe meeting!!) in which Tony Self of Hyperwrite introduced delegates to the DITA Help technical sub-committee which he currently chairs.
I was at the conference as an Exhibitor for DITA Exchange, and I was kept very busy with enquiries at my stand. My vendor presentation went well and the live internet connection to a Microsoft SharePoint Server located in Denmark actually worked.
But the best news for people concerned about the slow pace of DITA adoption is that in a pre-conference survey which asked delegates which help technology interests them for the future more than a third of delegates chose DITA. I think that's an impressive and reassuring statistic.

A few of my unfavourite things in Microsoft Word

2008-09-09T14:08:00.004+01:00

I have enjoyed a long relationship with Microsoft Word for Windows, and I would describe myself as a reluctant admirer. As a heavy-duty user of Word, I understand that I am not using it in the way it was designed to be used, so I have modified my expectations accordingly. As well as my expectations, I have also learned to modify some of Word’s default settings so that I can have a little more control over its behaviour. As I have recently started working with Word 2007, I am going to describe some my my favourite tweaks – the adjustments that I make to disable my unfavourite features in Word 2003, and what the equivalent adjustments are in Word 2007.

Read the rest of this article on my web site...

Is editing a romantic profession?

2008-08-19T12:44:00.009+01:00

I don't often do film reviews, but I have to mention something I watched the other night on DVD. Billed as a "sleek, sassy romantic comedy", Suburban Girl had, for me at least, a fascinating occupational setting - the world of book editing and publishing.

The film stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin as a pair of generation-bridging lovers - a young woman with a much older man. Gellar plays a lowly Associate Editor in a small publishing company while Baldwin is the Editor-in-Chief of a much bigger publishing house. Gellar spends much of the film poring over typed manuscripts, scribbling notes to authors and writing reports for her managers. The film itself is interrupted by "editorial" comments to the audience, introducing different chapters of the story.

Gelllar is not the only actor whose subsequent career has risked being overshadowed by a long-running successful TV role, but she is good enough her as the innocent from out of town to make you almost forget the vampires in her past. She is at her best when her character gets embarassingly drunk at a literary party.

Baldwin plays the successful unmarried man with a photo album full of previous lovers who treats his women badly. Not an entirely likeable character, but I found him more the more believable actor.

Overall, I'm afraid the film itself didn't really succeed for me, as the plot was very thin and the dramatic development of Gellar's character was weak and not entirely convincing.

Beware the Default Manual

2008-08-12T15:25:00.002+01:00

Thomas Barker, in his book Writing Software Documentation, uses the term “the default manual” to describe a user’s guide that is organised according to features, rather than tasks. This sort of user’s guide has a chapter for each menu in a software program, and a section for each command. (For hardware, which Barker’s book doesn’t cover, it would describe every switch and button.) Barker rightly explains that this sort of manual is not really very useful for users. The information in a default manual, and in particular the way the information is organised, bears little or no resemblance to what the average user needs to do in their everyday working life. Like the old (and unfair) joke about Microsoft Customer Support, the information given is totally accurate but absolutely useless. In short, default manuals are the sort of things that give technical writing a bad name.

Like Barker, I believe in the importance of user focused documentation, and try never to write default manuals. Unfortunately a lot of my customers have yet to understand the difference between effective user assistance on the one hand, and the only kind of user manual they have ever been exposed to on the other, and the default manual is what they ask me to produce. I don’t always succeed in convincing them that their users deserve something better.

Barker does not discuss why default manuals are so prevalent. I can think of plenty of reasons. First of all default manuals appear to be quick and easy to write. They are based on the product’s features, so the structure of commands in user menus offers an instant structure for the manual, and an instant checklist to ensure that every thing is mentioned. Since they describe program features rather than user actions they are easy to write. Even the most junior programmer on the team knows that the New command on the File menu creates a new file. That’s why so many default manuals are indeed written by the most junior programmer on the team.

Default manuals reflect the developer’s world-view, or more accurately the development manager’s world-view. The development manager rarely sees any feedback or comments from customers, and has probably never spoken to a real life customer either. For development managers, thinking about users doesn’t just take time and effort, it requires a degree of objectivity and critical detachment from their work that was never part of their job descriptions. They have goals to achieve which are stated in terms of objects coded, features implemented, and overtime hours saved, not in terms of user task fulfilment or customer satisfaction. Those things have no relevance to their jobs or to their end-of-year bonuses.

The lure of the familiar is also significant. Like travellers’ tales of exotic creatures and peculiar peoples, the idea that a different and better way of writing user manuals might exist is regarded with more than a little scepticism by many in the developer community. Default manuals are all they have ever known.

A third reason for the popularity of default manuals is that they are an easy way of demonstrating that the development team’s “contractual obligations” have been met. I am thinking here of “contractual” in the broadest possible sense, and including not only written undertakings to external customers but also internal agreements and understandings with stakeholders within an organisation.

Default manuals are popular because they appear temptingly simple and easy, and because they can be shown to correlate directly to the product features. They can be written cheaply by an existing member of the team who won’t “bother” other developers with questions that waste their valuable time. Once they’ve been done, the development manager can tick several boxes at once – there is evidence that all the required features are there, the program’s features have been checked by a competent person, and hey presto, there are user manuals as well. In this scenario no-one is surprised or worried by the fact that the manuals will never be opened, let alone read. That was never anyone’s intention.

Fighting back against the default manual culture is a challenging and difficult undertaking, especially if you are the only professional writer around. But it is a noble cause and one that all technical writers should pledge themselves to.

How did they design Office 2007?

2008-08-07T08:37:00.010+01:00

I have just read a fascinating interview with one of the people responsible for designing the ribbon interface of Office 2007. (Thanks to Peter Bogaards of InfoDesign - Understanding by design for providing the link - Peter always recommends excellent material.) I know a large number of technical writers who are heavy-duty users of Microsoft Word, and the ribbon interface was one of the new features of Word 2007 that many technical writers of my acquaintance did not like at all when it was first launched. A common early reaction was something like: "just when we got used to where all the commands were in Word 2003, Microsoft went and changed everything again!" Opinions of Word 2007 have mellowed somewhat over the last year or so, as professional technical writers have got used to the new interface, and developed efficient ways of working with it.

The interview itself is by Dan Harrelson of Adaptive Path, and in it he speaks to Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Office User Experience team. The first thing that is clear from what Jensen says is that the heavy-duty professional Word user was never a focus of the Microsoft Office development effort. In fact, Harris says, it was ordinary users who were central to their thinking: "...we wanted normal people to be able to make beautiful, stunning documents and presentations. We wanted the average user to have access to professional-level results with fewer steps than in the past." Harris goes on to extol the virtues of being able to "beautify" a picture in your document with "great-looking designs", which you can now do with Office 2007's graphics engine. This type of aesthetic question is not usually uppermost in the minds of most professional technical writers. We are more interested in mundane stuff, like consistent application of formatting styles, paragraph or heading numbering that doesn't have a mind of its own, pagination that stays put, indexing, cross-referencing, tables of contents, and so on. In fact, most professional writers are really most concerned with getting the content right - making sure that the words themselves are accurate, concise, appropriate, effective - so even the word processing features we are interested in are actually a distraction for us. That may be why some technical writers get so annoyed when Word does unexpected things.

The most fascinating feature of the interview is the description Harris getting developers to observe usability tests.

"When you want to convince a developer to help you make a change to the product, nothing is as compelling as bringing the developer into the lab and having them watch people fail. (Video also works well if you can’t bring the developer to the lab.)

Putting a human face on a failure really drives home why it’s important to improve usability, and helps everyone to visualize concretely whom we’re building the software for. Any developer worth her weight wants to do the right thing for her users, and so you usually just need to show them a test or two, and you’ll find that they are much more willing to help you. We bring developers and testers into our user research labs as frequently as possible."

This is good to know, for several reasons. It's good to know that Microsoft use usability testing, and takes note of user research findings. It's even better to know that in this team at least, developers were engaged with the testing process. Telling companies reluctant to undertake usability testing that "this is what Microsoft do" may have a positive effect.

But it's also clear that Microsoft did not have heavy-duty users in mind when it developed Office 2007, which is why, in its standard "out-of-the-box" implementation, Word 2007 is still not the best choice for large scale technical publications.

Holidays and spam

2008-08-05T08:04:00.002+01:00

Last week I disconnected myself from the Internet, got in the car and headed north for a week's holiday in the English countryside. (We stayed at Wheeldon Trees Farm, near Buxton, which is in the Peak District National Park.)

Apart from the fine weather (we were lucky), the beautiful countryside, the excellent country pubs, and the interesting sites to visit, the holiday had another added bonus. There was no mobile reception for our network at least where we were staying. This meant I couldn't even check my email to see how the world was faring without me.

The world survived. When I returned to London I found my email mailboxes jammed with over 1,600 messages in just 7 days - and this number excludes most of the mailing lists I subscribe to. That looked like far more emails than I usually receive, and I was worried that I might have chosen a particularly busy week to go away.

On closer examination, I found that my spam filters had filtered out around 1,400 messages into easily deletable folders, leaving about 200 legitimate messages to look at. These messages included newsletters, circulars, and adverts - and some spam emails that had slipped through the filters - so the actual number of emails that were for me personally was just a couple of dozen. So despite first impressions, we had picked a quiet week for our holiday after all.

I know all the reasons for spam, and I know how to ignore the scams and phishing attempts. My email addresses are out there in the wild, and I can't stop them. On an individual level, I know my ISP and mail software have pretty good filters that save me plenty of time. What worries me is the danger that the sheer volume of electronic junk may one day overload the Internet completely.

Hurrah for Dr Johnson

2008-07-21T08:52:00.005+01:00

Dr Samuel Johnson, patron saint of this blog, earned an honourable mention in yesterday's Independent on Sunday. Katy Guest wrote in praise of blogging as a way to quash rumours and gossip. In "What's the best way to keep a secret? Tell the world the details on your website" she wrote about a Lancashire millionaire, Gary Dean, who has published full details of his divorce settlement on his blog to stop people talking about it behind his back.

Katy Guest paraphrased Dr Johnson for the "internet age":

Samuel Johnson said: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." This could be rewritten for the internet age. No man but a blogger ever wrote about his private life online.

I'm not sure that I quite follow the parallel here, nor I am quite happy with the suggestion that every blogger is a "blockhead" in any sense of the word, but I raised a small hurrah for my favourite quote from my favourite "harmless drudge" getting a few nanoseconds of fame.

Some places still available for distance learning MA courses in Communications

2008-07-19T13:26:00.006+01:00

I am told by my colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University that there are a few places still available for the distance learning MA programme in Professional Communications for the autumn session which begins in September.
The programme offers four courses of study, each with a slightly different emphasis, and all with some shared modules:
Corporate Communication, focusing on communication within organisations, including corporate image, ethics and public relations, looking at both theoretical and practical aspects of the communications process;
E-Communication designed to give you a thorough understanding of human and digital communication, and the growing importance of the web and other contemporary technologies as tools of corporate communication;
Professional Communication a flexible award in terms of the option modules combining theory and practice, and including document design, persuasive communication and communication strategy;
Technical Communication focusing on the means and methods of disseminating technical information and instruction to varied audiences, looking at the role of the technical communicator in a wide variety of industrial and corporate contexts.

I am an Associate Lecturer for the Technical Communications MA course, as well as a graduate of the course myself. I'd be very happy to answer any questions about the course.

This blog has moved

2008-07-15T09:41:00.003+01:00

Correction 19th July 2008
I have moved back now, but with my own domain name. You can now find this blog at http://www.theblockheadblog.co.uk

I hope you like the new colours. :-)

Original message 15th July 2008
If you followed a link to theblockheadblog.blogspot.com you will have found a redirection notice to send you here. I've moved my blog to a new home on my own ISP's server, rather than on Blogspot. This is an experiment, and I'll decide in a few weeks whether I am going to keep it this way. I am still using Blogger software to write new posts, for the time being at least.
I've lost a couple of features, such as the blogroll and the Technorati links, and if you have any ideas on how I can get those features back, or any suggestions on alternative blogging software I could use, please let me know.

The Lure of Modular Writing

2008-07-14T10:48:00.001+01:00

Since I started being more involved with a specific DITA product, I am seeing opportunities for modular writing everywhere. This may be a case of "when the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail", but every new prospective technical writing assignment looks to me like an opportunity for a modular approach.

A modular approach to technical writing doesn't mean adopting a particular technology or tool, it means adopting a different way of thinking about what you write. In an August 2001 article in Technical Communication, Michael Priestley of IBM urged writers to "ditch the book as the basic structure" in order to maximise the potential benefits of content reuse using DITA.

But even without adopting DITA, thinking of content in a more granular way can have benefits. Don't think I'm writing "three books for this client's product", rather think "I'm writing seventy-five topics". Ask yourself how this material can be split up into smaller stand-alone portions ("chunks")? Where are the concepts, and where are the procedures? What user steps are needed in more than one situation? What material needs to be repeated in every publication?

You can then decide separately how to assemble those topics into whatever publications and formats are most suitable. There are dozens of different tools to help make that job easier, and each tool has its own pros and cons.

I know that many technical writers think that a modular approach can be artificial and limiting, but I take the opposite view. It liberates technical writers from worrying about the presentation of technical information, so that they can concentrate on getting the content right - timely, accurate, concise, and relevant, and del=ivered as close as possible to the point of need.

Distance Learning at SHU mentioned in "The Independent"

2008-07-13T14:05:00.001+01:00

Last Thursday's (10th July 2008) "Independent" newspaper carried an article about the impact of distance-learning postgraduate courses, Distance learning is helping workers' careers – and their pockets, too. The article spotlights the growing popularity of distance-learning MA courses for people trying to get ahead in the workplace, where an undergraduate degree is often no longer enough.

One of the students interviewed in the article is a graduate of the Corporate Communications MA course at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). The student said she was "more confident knowing the theory that underpins what I'm doing every day", which is a key reason for undertaking academic study related to one's professional life. Corporate Communications is one of the four streams in the MA Programme in Professional Communication at SHU. The others are e-Communication, Professional Communication, and Technical Communication. I am of course, an interested party - as I may have mentioned before in this blog, I am an Associate Lecturer for the Technical Communications course.

Declining writing standards?

2008-07-09T09:20:00.000+01:00

Someone on LinkedIn Answers asked the question "Has writing gone the way of the Dodo?" and wrote that he didn't mean that writing was extinct, just that standards of business writing appear to have declined. He provoked a lot of responses from writers, and his question certainly hit a nerve with me, so here's what I wrote in reply:

"Mass literacy has been replaced by mass communication, and many people don't read any more they just watch or listen. I don't think you can master the complexities of written language - particularly written English - without reading widely or studying deliberately.

Modern school education hasn't done a good job of teaching the mechanics of English, and I have taught non-specialist undergraduate university students who have come to a class on writing and been unable to explain what an adjective is. "I didn't think this class was going to be about grammar", said one. But if you can't tell what the parts of a sentence are how can you ever hope to write a meaningful one? These students had clearly passed their GCSEs and A-levels even though they didn't appear to know much about language, and without devaluing their achievements it does suggest that the English language standards expected by examiners can't be that high.

Technology and market forces also play their part in keeping down the value of writing. There are people out there who will write you 250 words of SEO-focused junk copy for about 5p, making it difficult for professional writers of any kind to charge reasonable rates. My own approach to technical communication makes this aspect of the problem even worse, as I generally find myself telling clients they need to publish fewer words. Shouldn't that be cheaper?

I am constantly amazed that although people who have Microsoft Excel on their Windows PC don't immediately think that they can be accountants, everyone who has a copy of Microsoft Word thinks they can be a writer. Worse still, everyone who has a copy of Microsoft Word appears to think that they can be a typographer as well (and don't get me started on how "ICT Skills" are being taught in UK schools).

So I'd blame the decline in writing standards on a combination of a number of different expectations all coming together - people are offering very cheap writing services, so it's not worth paying for; there's a tool on my computer that "does" writing so it must be easy; I passed my exams at school without making much of an effort at writing skills so why should I bother to make an effort now?"

A custard cream? That's neet!

2008-07-04T07:24:00.000+01:00

The latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published this week, and there have been a spate of articles about some of the new words that are in the dictionary for the first time, including custard cream and neet. The OED is a repository of the words we use - it's a descriptive rather than a prescriptive publication. Our current preoccupations with the economy are therefore well represented, with sub-prime, non-dom, and boiler room all getting in for the first time.
The regular updates of the OED are ignored or mocked by people who have an authoritarian attitude to language (and probably to everything else in their lives).
I'll let you look up the new financial words for yourselves, but I'll explain that a custard cream is a type of biscuit (cookie, if you speak American English) with a vanilla cream filling. It's the iconic snack offered to donors after giving blood, so much so that the National Blood Service in the UK have a sticker with the slogan "I'd give my right arm for a custard cream"!
A neet, on the other hand is less tasty then a cream-filled biscuit. It's an acronym to describe a young person "not in employment, education, or training".

Adobe's PDF now an ISO standard

2008-07-03T13:05:00.000+01:00

Adobe's Portable Document Format has now become an ISO standard. This means that an independent non-commercial organisation is now the custodian of the technology standard. Read the ISO's press release in full.

This is similar to way that IBM handed over the DITA standard to the custody of OASIS.

Heaven depends on your point of view

2008-06-30T12:27:00.000+01:00

Mike Hughes has a great joke for technical writers to enjoy on his User Assistance blog.

Quite a few developers I know won't like it at all!

The real point is that most technical communicators could really make huge contributions, if they were only allowed to. In the meantime, enjoy the joke.

Writer and... what?

2008-06-20T08:20:00.000+01:00

An STC colleague spotted an advert on the Washington DC "craigslist" message board that takes the idea of combining careers to new heights - or depths. In what appears to be a serious advert for a copywriter to work on marketing materials - a post requiring a degree in Journalism or similar and that reports directly to the "Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing" - there is what the advertiser refers to as "a twist": "while you are writing copy you will also fill the role of security guard".

Reassuringly, the advertiser adds "You won’t carry a gun". The advert goes on to explain "The security guard spends most of the shift seated at the reception desk, and there will be very minimal security duties. Practically the entire shift you will be able to focus on writing copy – you’ll just happen to be wearing a uniform." (You can read the original advert here.)

We've all heard stories of successful writers and artists who began their adult lives by working in a series of unskilled jobs until they were recognised professionally. Some people do have two careers in parallel, like the American poet Wallace Stevens who had a lifetime career as an insurance company executive. But I've never come across an actual job description that said "copywriter and security guard" before.

This advert would be very funny if it wasn't betraying a disturbingly arrogant and condescending attitude to writers - and to security guards. "Your job looks easy, so it can't be important. You just sit around most of the day so you're not "doing" anything."

I hope this company gets the copywriter - and the security - it deserves.

Speaking on DITA

2008-06-20T08:16:00.000+01:00

I've been invited to speak at a British Computer Society event on XML and DITA in London on 15th July. Details and registration at: http://tinyurl.com/4ayvjb

DITA Exchange discussed on an MSDN blog

2008-06-18T11:03:00.000+01:00

John Mullinax of Microsoft has discussed DITA Exchange in an interview with Steffen Fredericksen on his MSDN blog under the title Democratizing DITA

This presents a very interesting overview of DITA Exchange, and discusses how the forthcoming Office Business Application for Microsoft Word 2007 will make it even easier for subject matter experts and other contributors to collaborate on creating DITA compliant technical documentation.