The Tech Writer vs. The Volcano

After a week of chaos-inducing activity, the volcano in Iceland finally ran out steam, or in this case, lava and smoke. If a mountain could be arrested for causing a public disturbance, surely this one would qualify.

Fortunately in our profession, we don't have to battle lava and smoke. However, we often have to clean up a mess. As smoke and ash cloud the air making it hard to see what's out there, so do confusion, apathy and vagueness cloud up a document.

One of my company's current projects is to rewrite an enormous documentation set. Some of the guides are several years old, and it shows. The documents were not always maintained, fogging up the truth, and hiding the important facts users need to know.

I am not certain of what would be the easier task: fixing the doc set, or getting a volcano to stop exploding.

Time will decide.

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The Mother of all Engineering Feats

British scientists were able to create human embryos with genetic material from one man and two women. The goal is to produce genetically altered "designer" babies and thereby eliminate hereditary diseases by combining the best bits of each person. It's a controversial idea, but if saves lives and improves health, I'm all for it. Plus, you'd get to tell all your friends you have three parents - how cool is that?

Just as people have genetic strengths and weaknesses, so do technical communicators have strengths and weaknesses in their profession. Strengths in technical communicators include:

• being friendly and outgoing
• able to work quietly in solitude
• able to work with a wide variety of people
• able to work with like-minded people
• a solid language background
• a solid technical background
• excellent written communication skills
• excellent oral communication skills
• able to see "the big picture"
• an eye for detail
• able to work in chaos
• are comfortable with routine
• able to follow existing standards
• able to create new standards
• able to view information textually
• able to view information graphically
• valuing simplicity over complexity
• valuing completeness over simplicity
• enjoy starting new projects
• enjoy updating existing projects
• able to work well with WYISWYG tools
• able to work well with non-WYISWYG tools

As should be obvious, no single technical writer could possibly have all these strengths, because many of them contradict each other. The best documentation teams, therefore, have a good mix of writers from a variety of backgrounds.

I was once asked in a job interview this intriguing question:
Who would make the better technical writer?
a) Someone who studied language and writing, and then later learned technical skills
or
b) Someone who studied technical information, and then later learned language and writing?

The short answer is - we can't know. The longer answer is: it depends what you mean by "better technical writer". Either person may match the requirements of a particular job, and it is impossible to know from these brief descriptions who is the more apt candidate.

For example, I remember looking through medical textbooks a few years ago. They contain detailed pictures of human anatomy. Only two types of technical communicators could have created these images:

a) a graphic artist who learned anatomy
or
b) a medical person who learned art

There is no way to tell by looking at the illustrations which of these two communicators were responsible.

You can never be all things to all companies. You cannot be "the perfect writer", however, you can be perfect for a particular job. You have a complex set of skills and traits - you "tech comm DNA". Know your DNA, and you will know where you should be and what should be doing.

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Inspired by truth

Inspired by true events is a tag line appearing in some new films. This slogan replaced the previous antiquated version: Based on a true story. It is also complete nonsense, because all films, indeed all art, is "inspired" by true events, because all art is inspiration from actual life.

This is a classic example of marketers taking a perfectly good piece of text and ruining it with meaningless gray words so as not to offend anyone. I enjoy fictional works as much as anyone, but please don't mix my fact and fiction. I would rather see a documentary than an artistic film claiming to be "inspired by true events", because in a documentary, I'd assume everything I see actually happened. In the "inspired" film, I wouldn't be so sure.

There are writers, and then there are technical writers, and never the 'twain shall meet. Technical writing is as different from fictional writing as house painting is from artistic painting. Writing a novel does not qualify a person to be a technical writer. It only qualifies them to be a story-teller.

We don't tell stories. We don't spin yarns or tell tales. We explain the facts; the what, where, when, why and how. We don't get into feelings or characters. We remain cool and unemotional in our work. You may try to change us to novelists and ad men, but you will fail.

We are logical. We battle confusion and uncertainty.

We are Vulcan. We are the Borg.

Resistance is futile.

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The Big Bang of Information

Scientists are edging ever closer to discovering the deepest mysteries of the universe. The world's largest particle accelerator, a monster of a machine with a circumference of 27 km, is now online. Named the Large Hadron Collider, this machine is so big it occupies two countries: Switzerland and France.

This accelerator smashes sub-atomic particles into each another at speeds approaching that of light, creating collisions of almost 14 trillion electron volts. (Almost enough to power Windows 7.) In doing so, scientists hope to recreate the conditions that existed immediately after the Big Bang, when the universe exploded into existence.

One popular misconception about the Big Bang is that it was an explosion of matter into space. In fact, it was an explosion of space itself. That is, space itself expanded, and continues to expand, into nothing. Now, it's very hard to define nothing; one can only say it is the opposite of something.

There was some concern that the accelerator might actually create a black hole, and swallow up our galaxy. If that happens, I may have to suspend this blog for a while. Black holes notwithstanding, the Large Hadron Collider could prove the existence of the Higgs boson, also know as the "God particle." If this particle can be recreated, it would have enormous cosmological implications, because it would prove the Standard Model theory of the universe, a theory that explains how all matter and energy are connected.

So, we have never been as close to the Big Bang as we are now. However, space is not the only thing that's been exploding: so has information. There's probably more information produced today in one second than was produced in a hundred years just a few centuries ago. Think of all the places information exists:

• the Internet
• computers
• bookstores
• signs
• stickers
  
• personal letters and documents
  
• companies
• governments
• that big mess in the back of your closet
  

Billions and billions of pages, and it keeps growing like a monster. Soon even the universe won't be big enough to hold it all.

Information has exploded as rapidly as the universe. But if the universe began as tiny particle, did all the world's information begin as one? And, if so, how could we represent that?

We could start with the word itself: information. But this word can be further compressed and expressed simply as the letter i, the international symbol for information. [i] signs are visible at airports and other public places. People intuitively know that [i] = information.

In addition, i has two parts: a short upward line with a small dot on top of it. The line is an arrow, directing you to a dot. The dot is the point, literally. If your document does not make the necessary points, it has no point, and it is not useful information, but dark matter.

All information, therefore, began from the lowly i.

The i tells all.

The i is infinite.

The i is the i-ching of our profession.

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3D Documentation

I recently experienced the latest technological marvel: 3D television, and have to admit - it is spectacular. The images have an incredible depth, and also can appear to "pop out" towards you, for a virtual virtual reality experience. But it ain't a cheap experience.

A 40" Samsung 3D TV currently sells for $2,500 CDN. The special glasses required sell for $250 a pair. For a typical family of four, that means an extra $1,000 just for the eyewear! And, you have to buy a new Blu-Ray player and new 3D Blu-Ray disks. And a new type of cable to connect it all. Didn't we just go from DVD to Blu-Ray? What's next? 4D TV?

To be fair, 3D TVs can also convert regular 2D images (regular TV channels and DVDs) to 3D, but the effect is not as great as with a true 3D source. If nothing else, 3D TV will drive down the price of regular HDTVs, which themselves are light years ahead of CRT TVs.

The price will have to drop considerably for this new technology to have any chance of succeeding. If it does, it is proof that people are willing to spend just to get an extra dimension. However, dimensions don't just apply to images: they also apply to information.

The dimension of information is its scope and quality. If the contents of a guide have a good dimension to them, it means they are in-depth, clear, detailed, meaningful and practical. If the contents lack dimension, then the guide is "flat". A flat guide explains only the basic facts of a product, and not their relevance or practical application. A flat guide does not add value; a dimensional guide is the essence of "value-added".

Adding dimension to a guide means including things such as:

• clear explanations of all the concepts
• a detailed glossary of all the terms; if a term is used in the definition of another term, it should be hyperlinked to its definition so the user can easily move from one term to the next
• an explanation of exactly why a user would complete a task, before presenting the actual task steps; if the explanation itself raises another "why?", then it is not a true explanation
• different ways to accomplish the same task
• relevant cross-references to other topics (but not too many because then the user will be overwhelmed!)
• detailed screenshots, with all of the elements clearly labeled
• a rich index that anticipates all the ways a user might look up a topic
• a feedback form where users can directly comment on the usefulness of a topic

Don't be flat. Take your docs into the next dimension. (No 3D glasses required.)

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