Clarity trumps probably all other considerations in the actual writing part of technical writing. (I say “probably” because anytime you use such absolutes, you can be quickly proved wrong.) In this particular case, it trumps style.

In my role as a reviewer of department communications, I recently edited a document of brief project status reports. One project’s information contained a line like this:

Project objective: Complete the merger of A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s operations and technology resources.

Now, the use all those possessives didn’t seem right. I checked my trusty Chicago Manual of Style. CMOS 5.27 states:

Joint and separate possessives. If two or more nouns share possession, the last noun takes the possessive ending. . . . If two or more nouns possess something separately, each noun takes its own possessive ending.

Normally, I’d say that each noun’s possessed thing is separate, so each should have the possessive after all. But then again, we’re talking about a merger of those possessed things. So are they actually separately possessed? Or do A, B, C, and D all possess the merged operations and technology resources collectively?

Dilemmas, dilemmas.

So I removed the possessives. But that resulted in a garden path sentence:

Project objective: Complete the merger of A, B, C, and D’s operations and technology resources.

When you first read the sentence this way, it sounds like A, B, and C are being merged, not things that are possessed by A, B, C, and D. Or even that A, B, and C are being merged with D’s operations and technology resources. So I put the possessive endings back in to maintain clarity over style considerations.

My manager—the second-level reviewer—ended up rewriting the sentence completely, but this little episode illustrated to me how asking what version is clearest can settle other questions.

If you’ve read the responses of the 25 most influential tech comm bloggers and honorable mentions to being listed, you may have noticed that I haven’t said anything about it before now—other than on Twitter the day the list was posted. One reason is that I had other post ideas and some guest posts I wanted to publish first.

Now I’ve gotten around to it.

What Influence Is

Brian Solis recently wrote about how influence has been confused with online popularity. He says:

Over the years, I’ve explored the roles of influencers in social networks and as a result, I’ve refined the definition as simply the ability to cause measurable actions and outcomes. Intentional influence then assumes that certain actions are therefore definable and as a result, desired activity and results are now designed into strategies. The execution of these plans is then dependent on the reach and conviction of the influential voices to which they’re aligned.

One of the classes in my communication minor in college focused on persuasion and social influence. (Yes, majoring in English and technical writing and minoring in communication may be redundant. But the minor gave me a perspective on how people communicate in general, not just how to communicate technical concepts to people.) In this period of the ubiquity of social media, thinking about social influence is highly relevant.

Our textbook was Persuasion, Social Influence, and Compliance Gaining, of which our professor was a coauthor. The book is based partly on the premise that the three named concepts are closely related or synonymous and that they’re aimed at changing people’s thoughts, attitudes, or behaviors.

I believe influence is different than a social circle or even than attraction. Someone may be in my circle without being influenced by me. People may be drawn to my blog through a link on Twitter and never be influenced by what they read. I agree with my college professor’s view of influence: it’s bringing about change in someone else.

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In our ongoing department reorganization, we technical writers are experiencing some angst as we carve out a desirable place for ourselves. However, as we’ve talked about it as a community of practice (no longer as an organized team with our own manager), I think we’re coming to an agreement that now is the time to make things happen—to strike, as Tom likes to say.

After the initial, high-level reorganization, Tom and I are in the same division, so we’ve discussed a plan for taking a more prominent place in project managers’ and interaction designers’ consciousness. This is the key for us because the PMs are the ones to include us in their project plans and budgets, and we would be working with designers to decide on user education approaches and contribute to the design itself.

Finding Tech Comm’s Place in the Family

After Tom’s blog post about our meeting with an interaction design manager, I asked him about his point of view and his readers’ reactions to the post. We discussed getting involved in projects early and contributing to user interface text. We talked more about this in our community meeting this week. Again, we’re looking to make sure that the people who make the decisions give us a rightful place at the table.

We also talked about many designers’ “holy grail” of creating products so intuitive that no documentation is needed. Tom reminded me and then the group of an important point I had forgotten. An interaction designer once said something like this to me, and I had passed it on to the team: “Saying that ‘if the interaction designer does his job right, the product doesn’t need help’ is like saying ‘if the developer does his job right, the product doesn’t need QA.’”

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Guest post by Larry Kunz.

Two years ago I hadn’t heard of content curation, and you probably hadn’t either. Now it’s everywhere. The steam of content is turning into a flood. (Brett Swanson calls it the exaflood.)

As a technical communicator, if you’re not already assimilating content from all across the organization—as well as from your customers—you soon will be. In fact, your customers won’t wait to be invited to the party.

This subject fascinates me, and I like to read everything I can about it. I’m noticing something: as the flood of content increases, the flood of content about content curation is increasing too. Blog posts. Slide decks. Webinars. All with their attendant tweets, RSS feeds, and email notifications.

I’m not alone. As I was preparing this piece, I ran across an article in which Ian Greenleigh wrote that he has trouble handling all of the “shiny” new stuff being written about content curation. Like Greenleigh, I have a column in TweetDeck labeled #curation. Unlike Greenleigh, I don’t have ADD—but I still find it devilishly hard to keep up with everything.

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Guest post by Kristi Leach.

So, You Need a Book about Usability

A while back, I asked Karen Bachmann, a usability expert in our STC chapter, to recommend some books for our tech comm department. I was looking for a place to start with the topic. Without hesitation, she told me everyone should read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.

So, I ordered both Krug’s books: Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy. Rocket Surgery is an expansion on his explanation of how to do simple, cheap usability testing. It comes with great check lists and sample scripts that you can download, along with a free chapter of the book and recommendations on equipment.

Once I had read Don’t Make Me Think, I wanted to send recommendations to our developers. That seemed like an overwhelming undertaking, so instead, after reading Rocket Surgery, I decided to implement a testing schedule for our documentation, with the long-term goal of getting to test our products.

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I knew from the email subject line that I wasn’t going to like what was in the message.

The subject contained the name of an application, then two frightening words: “help sheets.”

I’ve found that outside the tech comm profession, people tend to throw around terms like “help” and “tips” without really thinking about what they mean. That’s why I felt a bit of dread as I opened this particular email.

The Rogue Documents

Looking for feedback, the product manager had forwarded two Word documents from an instructor who teaches this particular application as part of a week-long training for office staff. The instructor had documented a couple of end-to-end processes that weren’t strung together like that in the help.

Let’s just say that these documents weren’t done by a professional tech writer. I didn’t even get down to giving feedback on a content level; a subject-matter expert did some of that. Instead, I was concerned that by giving these documents to the class members, we were providing an inconsistent and less-than-professional experience.

I was also concerned because these documents’ pages were numbered 35 through 41. So what else was there that we didn’t know about? How much effort was being duplicated? Since it’s my full-time job to create such materials, I would have preferred if the instructors let us know about the need and asked me to fill it. Frankly, it felt a bit threatening, as if I thought my job was in danger. I considered this “rogue,” or unofficial, documentation.

The Idea

I ignored this email until the next day. Then, however, I decided to change my stance. I realized this was an opportunity, not a slap in the face.

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Guest post by Peggy Harvey.

In today’s world of technology changing in the blink of an eye, ongoing professional development isn’t an option for technical communicators, it’s a requirement. Over the past decade the field of technical communication has grown and gained more respect as a legitimate profession, and the complexities of the job and skill base required of technical communicators have also increased. Some of what’s new we can learn on the job—if we have a job—but sometimes we need to obtain the skills to stay vital in other ways.

When it comes to professional development in tech comm there are a lot of options. If you’re gainfully employed, enjoying what you do, and just need to brush up on the latest tool, then probably just a training seminar or a short online class is all you need. But if you’re not employed, or employed in a different capacity than you’d like to be, then you might want to consider a bigger educational commitment to make yourself more marketable as a technical communicator in today’s world.

In 2008 I stepped out of the working world to go back to school to earn my master’s degree in technical communication. While I’d started my career as a technical writer in a software development environment, I’d changed roles along the way, and by 2008 I was wondering how I’d gotten on the train I was on and, more importantly, how I could get off of it. I decided earning an advanced degree was the right decision for me, so in January, 2009, I took the plunge and started graduate school as a full-time student.

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