Last year, I was working with a producer in our organization’s motion picture studio to create a training video. He has done some work in Hollywood and knew Kirk Douglas. I griped that Hollywood doesn’t get the picture when people pay to see certain kinds of movies and they don’t make more of those kinds—they continue to run garbage out of the mill though most of it doesn’t make much money.

This producer told me that they don’t make movies for us; they make movies for each other.

Now switch your brain over to your technical communication. Are we like that? I have joked myself that I get paid to write stuff that no one reads. However, probably because of my profession, I’m more likely to use the quick-start guides or check the help system while using something. Documentation is there in my consciousness.

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Last week’s STC Summit in Philadelphia was the first society-wide conference I’ve attended. I looked forward to the conference as an opportunity to learn to improve my technical writing and find out how the technical communication profession is taking advantage of Web 2.0.

Here are some positives and negatives from my experience at the summit.

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My brilliant idea was going to be a couple of pages added to this site. The first is a page that highlights books that I own and recommend, along with some descriptions. (Gordon McLean has a bookshelf page that is largely images only.) I still plan on doing that, and the object of posting that intention here is to make it a commitment. You’ve heard it here, folks, so I can hardly be a flake about it now, can I?

The other idea I had was a CSS reference mostly for myself, but which others may find useful. However, there’s something better.

Peter Grainge, Adobe Community Expert on RoboHelp, mentioned in a RoboHelp forum post that there’s a little, free-of-charge CSS editor out there called TopStyle Lite. TopStyle Pro will cost you, but Lite is still a nice tool and provides selector and property options as you go along. It has a Style Inspector that basically does what I would have done.

Usually, one’s job function translates easily into a job title. One who manages is a manager. A person who administrates is an administrator. When someone drives, he’s a driver.

That kind of thing doesn’t always work so well in technical communication, I’ve noticed.

You do get easy terms such as “instructional designer” out of instructional design. On the other hand, our team at work is called the “User Education Team.” This encompasses more than technical writing, so calling ourselves technical writers doesn’t do us justice. But when you try to shift what we do—educate users—to a job title you get… user educator.

This isn’t the only place it’s difficult. The term “user assistance” is used in the field, but if your job is user assistance, does that make you a user assistant?

I think a job title that includes the word “documentation” would be good, because most of my responsibilities involve producing software documentation. Does that make me a software documentationer? I’m obviously not serious. But the dictionary says one who documents is a “documentalist”—however, I’m reluctant to adopt a job title that includes the word “mental.” So this is where you get “documentation specialist.” The same goes for “usability specialist.”

It seems a little funny that, being writers at heart and therefore professional manipulators of language, some of the terms we pick for our field don’t easily translate into job titles.

Maybe that’s a good title: Information Manipulator.

Have you had any technical communication job title woes?

I saw a recent article that said that according to one language watcher, English is getting close to having a million official words. There is some debate, of course, including from people of Oxford English Dictionary. One of the factors of language change that is especially significant in our time, though ignored in this article, is the rapid advances in technology. But in the rush to give an innovative name or verb to everything, let’s not forget English’s old town charm.

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I have enough to say to follow up on my previous post regarding RoboHelp vs. Flare that I thought a new post was in order. (If you read the other post, read the ensuing discussion.) One of the things that made me think about that topic in the first place was seeing Flare’s ad that suggested trading in your “legacy” software for the “new model,” Flare. RoboHelp was the only product mentioned by name in the promotion that offers a discount for switching. However, I’ll not assume that Mike Hamilton has anything to do with MadCap’s marketing, since he’s involved in the product management.

The podcast that Tom mentioned has Hamilton saying he wanted to disband some myths floating out on the Web about what happened between him and Macromedia. A brief summary: When Macromedia acquired eHelp, he expected RoboHelp to go to the next level, but they primarily wanted RoboDemo (now Captivate), another eHelp product. Macromedia seemed to make some counter-productive decisions: The RoboHelp team was working on RoboHelp X6 and only three months from release when Macromedia laid off half the team and planned to send RoboHelp to India. Then Macromedia decided to drop it completely, even though it was a very profitable product. When MadCap was founded, Hamilton and that team thought RoboHelp was dead. They wanted to provide something to help authors that was alive and running.

What I remember reading at the time this was going on, though, indicated that Hamilton was pretty skeptical of Adobe’s ability and commitment to carry RoboHelp forward. In the podcast, Hamilton mentions advantages of Flare that RoboHelp 7 also has. Macromedia clearly set RoboHelp back by shelving it, but Adobe has pushed it forward. He’s doing what he should when he promotes Flare, and perhaps it’s the fact that Flare’s history is so tied up with RoboHelp that it’s hard at this point to talk about the strengths of Flare without talking about RoboHelp.

At least in the podcast, Hamilton still seems to view RoboHelp as a limping technology, and MadCap’s ad appears to reflect that. Again, I’ve simply given my own observations of what happened. As my father says: Opinions are like noses—everybody’s got one. And if you’re like me, your opinions may be as strong as your nose, too.

A couple of years ago, I was using RoboHelp X5, a help authoring tool (HAT) that was several years old. In the software industry, letting your product go that long out of date is bad for business. RoboHelp still had a lot of users for a couple of reasons: Many had used RoboHelp and its predecessors for years, and there weren’t very many alternatives.

Macromedia had shelved RoboHelp and disbanded the product management team and RoboHelp developers in 2005. Mike Hamilton, the product manager, left about that same time. On the Internet, Hamilton criticized Macromedia, and by extension Adobe Systems, who had purchased Macromedia. He announced his joining a new company, MadCap Software, and that they would be releasing Flare, their flagship product and new HAT.

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