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Journals by EmailAt the STC Summit, Tom Johnson and I gave a presentation entitled “Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation.” Frankly, I was kind of proud of that title because it just fit within the eight-word limit.
Like usual when I’m speaking in public, I was nervous beforehand, my mouth went dry within the first few minutes, and after that I was fine.
Overall, comments were good. Someone went as far as to say that our presentation gave him the most specific information in the three years he’s attended the Summit. We had a full room, and three people watched from the hall. On the other hand, an anonymous (according to Tom) person tweeted that our presentation was more frustrating than interesting and lacked a moderator and concreteness. I’m not sure why the person chose to be anonymous; I hope it wasn’t a fear of some kind of backlash. Tom and I aren’t going to turn around and send hate-tweets.
It was a good experience, but after something like that, I feel like not presenting for the next five years. It’s a lot of buildup to that one hour, and then afterward I second-guess my performance. As Tom pointed out as we discussed it later, that piece of negative feedback did make us think about how to do better. If the world had no naysayers or detractors, maybe we’d have less motivation to improve things.
Still, the topic is something we think is important, and there isn’t much information out there in the way of quick reference writing strategies. If you google “quick reference guide,” you get a bunch of examples of them—but nobody’s suggesting to you how to go about creating them.
Our objective in this presentation was to give people specific strategies for deciding when to use quick reference guides, developing the content, and designing them. I’d like to point out that we don’t recommend them for all situations, just that you consider them for your projects and documentation sets.
Tom and I agreed to provide our proceedings document on our blogs so that they could reach a wider audience. I’ve provided it as a PDF download accessible here. With Tom’s permission, I’ve made some modifications based on some pieces we had to leave out due to the limited space in the proceedings, as well as things that came out as we prepared for the presentation and talked afterward. I also added the cartoon we had in the presentation. I hope you enjoy.
If you’re interested in some quick reference guide templates in InDesign file format, visit Tom Johnson’s template page.
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