tech writing – Page 2 – TechCommGeekMom

As I had mentioned in my first post about Adobe Day, there were several well-known tech comm authorities presenting, and Scott Abel was the first presenter. Scott is the founder and CEO of The Content Wrangler, Inc., and he has a great Twitter feed and blog, if you haven’t read them. Scott’s presentation was called, “More than Ever, Why We Need to Create Structured Content.” If you’ve never read Scott or seen Scott speak, he is a force to be reckoned with, as he’s definitely got strong opinions from his experiences, and he’s not afraid of letting you know what he thinks.

Scott explained that structure is in everything we do–including in nature–so it would make sense that content needs to be structured as well. Structure formalizes a content model and provides authoring guidance. It can enhance the usability of content, providing visual cues and is the foundation for automatic delivery of content through syndication. Structure makes it possible to efficiently publish to multiple channels, outputs and devices from a single source, making it a critical component of transactional content and making business automation process possible. By providing structure, it is possible to adapt content and leverage responsive design techniques. Structure also allows us to leverage the power of content management systems to deliver content dynamically and increasingly in real time. By creating structured content, it is possible for us to move past “persona-ized content” and facilitate innovative reuse of content in known sets of related information as well as in the unknown needs as well.

Scott quoted author and technologist Guy Kawasaki by saying that innovators must allow time for the majority to catch up; new ideas take time to filter through. He followed up with the question, “How much time does it take to adopt?” He answered his question by explaining that technological innovation is getting faster, and the technological adoption rate is becoming shorter, which is good news. However, how long to adopt structured content? He explained that it’s actually not a new idea–the idea started in 1963! It started with the Sequential Thematic Organization of Publications created in the airline industry to standardize airline manuals.

With that in mind, Scott presented that the question now is to figure out where are we today with structured content. Scott concluded that right now, one of the major challenges is that old ideas are getting in the way because many technical communicators are still stuck with design concepts created in the print paradigm. Other major challenges include the lack of knowledge and experiences, writers making manual updates, the lack of human resource support, and making tools work with configurable content. He did point out that lots of reuse content is going on! His point was that the tools work, but it’s the people and processes are the problem, as Sarah O’Keefe paraphrased him on Twitter.

So when asked why we should be technical communicators, Scott’s response was that as technical communicators, we know how to create structured content. Knowing how to create structured content increases our value and makes us marketable. “Our professional needs to change whether we like it or not,” he concluded, to keep up with these technological changes.

Much of what Scott talked about in his presentation was echoed again in the panel discussion later in the morning. Scott had provided a few examples during the presentation which showed what unstructured content versus structured content looked like, and it was very clear what the differences were. As technical writers, as Scott said, we understand the importance of structured content and how reused content can be used effectively. Those who don’t have that mindset tend to repeat the same processes and make more work for themselves, wasting time and money for a company. We have value, and we need to promote our skills in creating this kind of content organization. I think technical communicators take this ability for granted, and by being proactive in showing how we can help create efficient and structured content, we can add value not only to ourselves, but also provide on a larger scale a true cost-saving service to our respective companies and clients.

(Scott–if you are reading this, please feel free to clarify anything that I’ve written if I didn’t interpret it quite correctly in the comments.)

Scott later offered his slideshow online, which is available with his permission.

Scott’s talk was a great way to start the morning, and lead smoothly into the next presentation by Sarah O’Keefe, titled, “Developing a Technical Communication Content Strategy.”

Next: Adobe Day Presentations: Part II – Sarah O’Keefe and Content Strategy

Today’s entry from the TCGM grad school archives is from April 2010, when I was still a tech comm fledgling. Note the reference to Walter Issacson towards the end of the entry. His name might be more familiar to us now, as he is the official biographer of the late Steve Jobs, and whose book came out just after Jobs’ death last fall. I have always been a history geek, so it was fun to try to make this connection back then (and I still stand by it!)

So what do you think…would ol’Ben here have been an m-learning advocate? Knowing his love of communication and technology, as well as his avid promotion of literacy and education, methinks he would’ve totally supported it!

On a night when I finally felt mentally and physically exhausted enough to take a break, I found my husband channel surfing on TV. (Now that we have an HD-TV, he’s on it a lot more than he used to be.) Among the channels that he does like to watch– and I do too, is the History Channel in HD. Last night, I think the show was Modern Marvels, and they actually had the whole episode dedicated to the works of Benjamin Franklin. Now, I’ve always had a slight soft spot in my heart for Ben Franklin, ever since I was in about third grade, and read my first biography about him, and knowing that he had strong ties to Philadelphia, which is the city I most associated with when I was growing up (even though I lived halfway between New York and Philly, Philly has family and that was the “culture” I was oriented around.) This was recently revived with a trip to the Franklin Institute with my son.

Anyway, I didn’t catch the whole show, and of course, my husband would be channel surfing during commercials, but from what I was catching of the program, which was towards the end of the episode, they were talking about Franklin being ahead of time on many levels–which he was–and how he was a big player when it came to eighteenth century communication and science. We know that Franklin was the one who was a newspaper printer, a philosopher, a statesman, a politician, and a scientist. But the thing that ties all those other elements of this post-Renaissance man is that he was a writer. He was a prolific writer, in fact, writing everything from the contents of the Pennsylvania Gazette, to books about philosophy, and writing letters and documents that helped to form the United States and its diplomatic ties. He also opened up the first public library in the United States, specifically the Library Company of Philadelphia, whereby patrons could join for a small fee and share the books in the library, for the purpose of learning and being able to exchange ideas.

The author Walter Issacson, who wrote a biography about Ben Franklin, was one of the commentators, and he was saying that if Ben Franklin lived in this day and age, he’d be loving it! With this being the digital age of email, computer communications, cell phones, Twitter, etc., Franklin would’ve been totally in his element, as he was all about the latest in science and communication, and for a guy in his time, he was on the cutting edge of such things. Part of a segment I saw talked about how Franklin was the first one to help devise the concept of watermarks and other security devices to protect the manufacturing of money, some of which are still used today. It was also mentioned that if Franklin had a new way of doing something or a new invention, he always shared his ideas and how he did them, with the exception of this currency security printing method, understandably. So, that makes me think that perhaps with all the cool inventions and discoveries he made, and considering that he was both a scientist AND a writer, that sharing that information made him the first American technical communicator.

What do you think? It’s a pretty good theory, anyway. 😉