What are you thinking when you review documentation?

We recently had a short discussion about how peer review, what we thought it was and how it should work. For us, having another member of the documentation team look over your work is useful for several reasons. Whilst we have distinct technical and editorial review stages, having another technical writer look over your work helps highlight things concerning structure, ordering and the killer of all killers, confusion.

Seth Godin nicely captured the reason why this is an important stage of information production:

If you’re building for digital, for a place where you can’t possibly be present to guide or to answer questions, I think it’s vital you have someone who can review your work … Not to make suggestions to make it better (what do they know?) but to share their confusions.

The thing is, it’s easy when you’ve been working on something for several weeks to get too close to the material and start making presumptions. These, inevitably, lead to confusion for the reader. It’s never an intentional thing, and everyone does it (and if they think they don’t, I’d suggest they may not be aware that they do!) but it’s something that we can easily catch.

The way we work, with each technical writer working on a distinct part of the product, it’s reasonable to assume that we can review a document without too much presumed knowledge. It’s not the same as handing the document to someone with no knowledge at all but we can usual spot those areas that may cause confusion.

Typically, these are the things that seem obvious when someone points them out, which a new customer will spot immediately because it leaves them perplexed. Unfortunately those are the moments when confidence in the content drops and, for many people, it only takes one or two instances of these for the documentation to be cast aside, never to be used again.

Catching points of confusion is a crucial part of any review process, it doesn’t really matter whether you have a specific process for it but it is something you should try and make sure you are addressing.

The next ISTC West of Scotland area group meeting in Glasgow will take place on Thursday 9th June 2011, from 7.30 pm onwards. Come along to talk about latest news and trends in communication, or just to meet other communication professionals.

The event is free and open to anyone interested in technical communication, such as technical authors, information architects, internal communication professionals, report writers, marketing writers, web content writers and graphic designers.

Venue: Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.

Please forward this message on to your colleagues or anyone else who may be interested. For more information, contact westscotland_areagroup@istc.org.uk.

A guest post by Noz Urbina, Mekon Senior Consultant and Congility 2011* Conference Chairperson

* Keep reading for discounted and even free entry opportunity.

The Hole in Holistic
There’s an industry buzz about Content Strategy. But, in it, there’s a tendency to define Content Strategy as near synonymous with internet marketing strategy, or worse, clever web copy writing.

There’s regularly an assumption that we’re talking about B2C mass-market writing where we’re trying to drive web conversions, ‘excite’ customers, and drive click-throughs.

Although web marketing projects need content strategy, I don’t think that adequately defines the discipline. All dentists are doctors, but not all doctors are dentists.

Content Strategy is in its adolescence, and the discipline is asking: Who are we? Why are we?