My friend and STC colleague, Steve Jong, has written an excellent piece for this month’s STC Intercom magazine that’s definitely worth read.
As I’m about to start on my new gig soon (red tape holding it up right now), this is a topic that’s been very much on my mind, so the timeliness of the article is great. I like how Steve has broken it down based on the audience types and their needs. After all, it’s practically the mantra of all technical communicators to ask, “Who’s the audience?” so that we can cater our work appropriately. One always hears about the “faster, better, cheaper” of documentation, but Steve breaks it down on how that can actually work based on setting realistic goals based on your audience without losing quality in the process. I know that’s a goal of mine going into any project that I do!
As this article is openly available, I urge you to take a look, and really savor the information. I think it will either reinforce what you might instinctively know as a technical communicator, or it will clue you in to some things that you might not have thought about.
See the link below, and let me know what you think in the comments.
Thanks for the pointer to Steve’s article. I admire his insight in classifying documentation quality by three sets of stakeholders: customers, clients, and communicators. Not only do we have different audiences for our content: it turns out we have different audiences for our quality criteria too.