Education Seminars...two days + four seminars = success!

by Kim Creed, Education Manager

On February 17 and 18, the Southwestern Ontario Chapter STC, hosted its annual Education Seminars. Located at the Hilton Garden Inn, Cambridge, attendees participated in four workshops over two days.

Different Crowd

In terms of demographics, this year's event got an infusion of new faces and ideas, drawing attendees from places like Ottawa, Burlington, and Toronto. In addition to technical writers and editors, the seminar appealed to a handful of marketing and business analysts. The diversity of participants provided for lively discussions and information exchanges.

1. Developing a Style Guide

Vivian Viitala, an experienced technical writer and team leader, walked us through her presentation on Developing a Style Guide. Vivian was a team leader at Leitch Technology, where she took on the unofficial role of style guide "cheerleader." Over the course of four years, the Leitch Technology writing team, located at multiple sites, worked to create a common style guide.

The Value of a Style Guide

During the presentation, Vivian stressed the value of a style guide in terms of:

• reducing the amount of time needed for team members to debate what to do in a given situation,
• managing customer expectations, and
• maintaining a professional look and feel to the documentation.

Consensus and Support

Vivian noted the importance of gaining consensus among the team members, that is, among those who must reference and apply the style developed. She recommended enlisting a champion for the cause (a member of the management team who can support the effort) to ensure that adequate departmental resources are allocated for the project. Vivian said that, ideally, the writing team ought to piggyback development of a style guide onto another corporate- or department-level initiative, such as rolling out a new tool or process. The doubling up effort helps to feed momentum between the projects.

Shared Experiences

Participants worked through related activities and volunteered some of their own experiences. Even the lone writers could see some value to developing a style guide. Overall, it was an engaging start to the seminar.

2. Template Development

Bernard Aschwanden, accomplished author, technical trainer, Adobe Certified Expert, and founder of Publishing Smarter, provided participants with hands-on ways of working better with Adobe FrameMaker and MS Word.

After performing an impressive back handspring for the audience, Bernard shared best practices on template development for both Adobe FrameMaker and for MS Word.

Fuller Use of Tools and Templates

Bernard covered off how to review a document to identify content types, optimize formatting text using the character and paragraph designers, setting and working with master pages, to name a few. He showed us how to make fuller use of our primary writing tool and to extend template development and its usage to its full capacity.

Faster Conversion and Publication

In addition to the common look and chunking of information that a good template provides, publishing the document becomes a whole lot faster and easier. When the template is built correctly, conversion of the document from one application to another, for example, FrameMaker to RoboHelp, and using a batch feature to implement document-wide changes become possible and easy. In other words, Bernard's presentation impressed upon participants that when used correctly, the tools that writers use can free them to become writers again, and leave the formatting part to the template.

For information about Bernard's book on advanced FrameMaker usage, go to www.publishingsmarter.com.

3. Mapping the Content Ecosystem

STC Toronto VP Rob Hanna brought his fifteen years of technical writing experience to the table to dispel what single-sourcing is not and to promote a new model for writing that separates format from content. He spent much time helping participants to re-think the way we manage information within our roles as technical communicators and at the level of the organization.

Content Modeling

To paraphrase one of the participants, content modeling is to a technical writer what object-oriented programming is to a programmer. Content modeling is akin to object-oriented writing where the content fits inside a prescribed format. The end goal of this information management model is to facilitate the ease at which content can be repurposed, and to improve the freshness of the information.

Essentially, Rob outlined that content remains fresh in this model because it is pulled from a dynamic repository. As soon as a document is published, it is committed to the page and no longer lives. Content management attempts to move publishing into real time.

Repurposed Content

Rob showed participants a demonstration of repurposed content taken from a print to an online environment. One of the participants pointed out that the online document referred to itself in the context of a written manual, which Rob acknowledged. For those who think single-sourcing is primarily about a database, the real time presentation revealed that it is not. Evidently, the writer remains central to the writing process in a single-sourcing model, and must still interpret and make intelligent decisions about the document to make repurposing content successful.

New Ways of Doing Things

Last, Rob pointed out that moving to the content management type of model implies a new way of working and a new way of thinking about information. Questions such as data ownership, and lifecycle of data, must be thoroughly investigated before a company shifts paradigms.

For a copy of Rob's white paper, The Information Management Model, go to www.ascan.ca/stc/whitepaper_imm.pdf.

4. Structured Authoring

The last, but not least, speaker came up from Pennsylvania to share his expertise on structured authoring using FrameMaker. Russ Ward, an experienced technical writer and founder of West Street Consulting, convinced participants that technical communicators already write structured documents. FrameMaker simply enables the writer to make that structure explicit.

FrameMaker Promoter

Russ is an unabashed promoter of using Adobe FrameMaker as a structured authoring tool. When he isn't writing for Spirent Communications, he consults on his own product, FrameSLT, a plug-in that transforms content for repurposing content without exiting FrameMaker.

The Importance of Structure

Citing an address as an example, Russ showed participants that the address convention contains recognizable elements, including name, street number and name, city, state (province) and zip (postal) code. When using FrameMaker as a structured authoring tool, the writer creates a structure within the template by specifying elements, such as name, street, city and state. With the explicit structure in place, the writer can employ plug-ins to perform content management operations. Structure also facilitates the ease with which a writer can manipulate elements, for example, dragging and dropping a table from location in the document to another, by working from the structured view window of the document.

Consistency is Key

By working with both the document and the structured view windows open, the writer gets a meta-view of the document and shifts into a whole new gear of control over the format of the document. This enables writers to make changes to the document quickly by manipulating elements. Additionally, if the writer inadvertently breaks the structure, such as placing a bulleted list within a procedure (against the prescribed structure in place), FrameMaker alerts the writer by showing a broken red line in the structured view window. Moreover, the structured authoring keeps all writers' documents looking consistent.

For more information, go to www.weststreetconsulting.com.

Wrap Up

The feedback for the workshop topics and for the venue has been very positive from both participants and speakers. Thanks to all for an informative, enjoyable seminar.

About Kim Creed

Kim writes technical documents at ATS (Automation Tooling Systems). Her current workload includes documenting assembly line machinery and creating a prototype of online help. Previously, she wrote documentation for optical carriers and business process automation software. When she isn’t writing, Kim practices yoga, sketches and creates stained glass pieces.