Learning by sharing

I’m in! I’ve received my ‘proposal accepted’ email from the organisers of TCUK (Technical Communication UK – the annual conference for anyone in my field in the UK) and I will be delivering a session on ‘Managing as a freelance technical communicator’.

I'm really looking forward to it, and have between now and mid-September to work out exactly what my message is, how I'm going to deliver it, and how I'm going to learn from the other people in the room.

Wait a minute... learn from the other people in the room? What’s going on – aren’t I the one supposed to be sharing knowledge? Well, this will be the fourth time I’ve presented at this conference (and its predecessor) – and each time I’m sure I’ve learnt at least as much from the experience as those who attended the sessions.

The first session (in 2008) was co-presented with Alison Reeves (of Write to Win). We did a 3-hour (yes, 3-hour) workshop on advanced techniques in Microsoft Word. Alison came to see me before the conference so we could work out who was doing what, and when. I lost count of the times one or the other of us would say, “How did you do that? Do it again... slowly.” We'd both been using Word for years – but we learnt a lot from each other that day.

Last year my session was on CPD (Continuous Professional Development, which some of you may know as CPE or Continuous Professional Education). I incorporated an exercise where people in the room discussed various activities and decided whether – and under what circumstances – they were valid CPD activities. Watching people discussing the options, coming to conclusions, arguing, changing their minds and challenging others opened my eyes to a much wider range of possibilities than the already-wide range I’d had in mind.

It's not just restricted to conferences – I teach writing skills, and am a tutor with the Open University, and it’s rare for me not to experience a fresh perspective at some point during a session.

TCUK is a fantastic learning experience even when I’m not presenting (which is the main reason I go – see 'Why you should attend TCUK 2013 - a personal perspective'). It’s also a great opportunity to catch up with others in my profession... the life of a freelance technical communicator can be somewhat isolating, even now there are two of us. If you are involved in technical communication, we’d love to see you in Bristol!

Alison

The Infinite Monkeys Approach

I once knew an expatriate worker in the Far East who was tasked with liaising with the office cleaners because he could “speak the language”. In theory this was a good idea. However, the cleaners were all profoundly deaf, so whoever got the job was going to have to learn or invent a sign language before they could begin, whatever languages they currently spoke. The assumption of competence being granted because of linguistic faculty is sometimes amusing when it happens in a second language (I ‘speak’ Mandarin, but that doesn’t mean I can quickly and easily understand a lecture about orthopaedic surgery in the language; I’d struggle to keep up with that topic even in English), but from a professional communicator’s point of view it is even more irritating when it's done in the workplace with technical documentation.

Recently I’ve been seeing some particularly bad examples of documentation. The kind of stuff that is so bad that it has passed the point of irritating users and is actively dissuading potential customers. What did it have in common? It was written by ‘experts’ – in the topic, not in communication. I wonder why it gets written like this, particularly when the time of specialist developers and engineers is taken away from their core duties to produce it.

What shocks me is that businesses already know that their geeks often work best when kept away from customers. It’s why they employ sales people to do the verbal communication that brings in sales... because customers want to hear about software meeting their requirements, not how cool the software is because the subroutines are all named after characters from Star Trek, deceased pets or steam trains.

I've also heard of ‘test’ entries into database products that have made their way into training and documentation materials, and even into the finished product. Sometimes these just hinder understanding (“test for empty field” isn't a good example to follow), whilst others can cause offence (“nutty as a fruitcake” as a mental health condition for example).

This criticism is not directed at developers, they do a job I couldn't do, and they do it well. It's directed at the person who decides that because their developers happen to speak English, they're going to save money and give them the documentation to write. As an approach to documentation management this is only marginally better than handing infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters (and marginally cheaper due to the resultant cost of infinite bananas).

Andrew

The Underground

Academics, especially the non-scientists, often face the criticism that they have an aloof existence in ivory towers. An easily recollected if ill-favoured example is academic and author H.G. Widdowson who in his book Practical Stylistics has the unfortunate habit of calling non-canonical poems “dogrel”; even when they’ve been written effectively and serve their intended audience well, and especially when they’ve been written in memory of departed relatives. This blindness to, and denigration of, changes in a field weakens not the target of the dismissal and contempt, but the person making the aspersions (which is why traditionalist generals lost out to Germans with panzers and a remarkably modern air force during the early years of WWII). With this in mind this week’s blog is a bit of a walk on the wild side, because out there in cyberspace there are thousands of amateur technical communicators doing very interesting things, sometimes approximating the tools we use, and sometimes innovating to get their message across.

First up there’s YouTube and the ubiquitous video demonstration; the most popular result for the search terms “how to” come from Household Hacker and run from an introduction to the manufacture (at home) of a magnetically responsive liquid to the creation of a candle powered space heater. The presenter uses a variety of camera angles and captions to get his message across, and succeeds in presenting easily reproducible experiments and activities to end users. Whilst he’s not using the latest and greatest technical communications software, he achieves his aims in a way that would make any technical communicator feel it’s a job well done.

Those of us who spend our time writing rather than getting to create video tutorials may feel that there’s less competition from amateur authors, but it does exist for some fairly commonly used software packages. Of course by “commonly used software packages” I’m talking about video games! There are entire communities of gamers on-line who dedicate hours of their lives to documenting the solutions and tricks that go into beating their favourite games. Matt Hughes writes guides to killing (virtual) aliens that are detailed, entertaining AND in line with best-practice in software documentation whilst gamer community forums share exceptionally detailed tips about complex virtual worlds and control methodology with accuracy and incredible end-user awareness (as effectively we have users writing for users).

What does this vibrant underground scene do for us as technical authors? Well, it should be serving to keep us on our toes and pointing towards effective uses of new platforms and media choices for our content.

Andrew

Test yourself

Even the best of us make mistakes. How often have you hit ‘Send’ on an email only to wish you could stop it going as you’ve just spotted the howler in the middle of the third line? And the tweets Andrew recently scheduled in the early hours of the morning are testament to this phenomenon too. What phenomenon am I talking about? The wonderful ability of the human mind to ‘fill in the gaps’ – to read what should be there rather than what is there... at least until it’s too late to do anything about it.

We all know it’s much easier to make this sort of mistake with something you’ve written, but even when it’s someone else’s work, we see patterns that don’t exist and make huge leaps of expectation.

Sometimes, though, it’s plain old lack of knowledge that’s the problem – people are hazy on some of the ‘rules’ of grammar and punctuation.

Just for fun, Andrew and I had a go at the Guardian’s grammar and punctuation quiz.

I’m sure our clients will be pleased to know that we passed with flying colours.

How do you think you’ll get on? Go on, I dare you...

Alison