bookmark_borderOn pedantry

I start this blog post with an admission and an apology.

Admission: I am a manager, I don’t spend a lot (any) of my time writing technical content these days.

Apology: One of my weakest areas is in the intricacies and ‘correctness’ of grammar. *

That said, there is one thing that continues to frustrate me about the technical communications profession, the constant ‘deep dive’ into every single aspect of one sentence, one clause. Dear grammar pedants, please stop!

Don’t get me wrong, I know that good written information is a keystone of our profession and I’m all for discussions to make sure things are being approached correctly and debated thoroughly, where appropriate.

Please note the last two words of the last sentence, “where appropriate”.

Maybe it’s just me, but as each of us write for a specific audience, likely to a specific style guide, such discussions become academic almost from the get go. What really irks is when discussions on other aspects of our profession are diverted towards this area. For example, “Content Strategy is important! … Yes, but ultimately the paragraph that someone reads once they have found it needs to be written in the active voice and never ever punctuate that bulleted list with commas… ”

And so on.

I’ve seen it so many times I’ve started using it as a guide. When any online discussion that isn’t explicitly about grammar and punctuation, whether forum or mailing list, reaches the point that someone reaches for the grammar gun, I stop reading, I disengage.

A few years ago, when the UA conference reached Edinburgh in 2008, one of the sessions was by Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum, a noted linguist. It was the closing session and I approached it with some dread, a presentation on language would surely be all about the use of transitive verbs and the perils of infinitives which are split. How wrong I was, leaving the room at the end with a simple, repeated message.

Write as you speak. Write as if you were explaining something to someone sitting next to you, put aside the rules of grammar if needs be!

I blame my current stance, my dislike of long academic discussions on someone who, I’m sure, has initiated and partaken of many such discussions himself.

Forgive me if I’ve offend anyone, I’m not saying that correct grammar is a bad thing, far from it, I just think that in the current day and age we, as a profession, need to raise our view and focus on bigger things. The language will take care of itself, one way or another, let it go!

We should be looking to influence, to sell, to push ourselves to the forefront of our companies as the experts we are in that valuable (and its stock continues to rise) commodity, information.

 

* Yes, there are deliberate mistakes in this post. Feel free to point them out in the comments.

bookmark_borderWhere I am at

I cannot believe I’ve not written about my trip to Singapore!

And I’m not going to, as I’ve yet to post my photos to Flickr so I’ll wait until I’ve done that.

That said, I’ve been busy since I got back, spending a few days in Newcastle at a conference, and the rest of the time trying not to be ill (and failing).

So it’s only really the past couple of days I’ve finally felt back to my usual self and started to get things back on track. It feels a bit odd, as I approach my 39th year on this planet, that I’m still ‘finding’ myself (and that sounds a bit new age wank but it is what it is!) but it’s true.

The past few years have been wonderful, horrible, amazing, and sad but the past is in the past so I’m looking forward more and more these days, mostly because I feel that I can now.

Where does that future take me? I’ve no idea. Professionally I’ll be assessing things come April next year, personally… well here are a couple of links which cover two areas I’m taking an increasing interest in:

  • Poly Means Many – There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month seven bloggers – ALBJAn Open BookDelightfully QueerMore Than NuclearPost Modern SleazeRarely Wears Lipstick, and The Boy With The Inked Skin – will write about their views on one of them. This project is called Poly Means Many, a name which was inspired by our varied views and also the definition of the word polyamory.
  • Buddhism A-Z – will consist of 26 posts (listed below) proceeding alphabetically through some of the things that Buddhism means to me and the ways I feel it speaks as acutely as ever to modern life. It will not be comprehensive. I couldn’t possibly, and won’t even try, to do more than scratch the surface.

Yes, the two topics are somewhat linked (by the fact that one person is involved with both projects, and because there are parallels between the two that I’ve drawn in my head) and, along with my continued efforts to improve my health and wellbeing, I find myself at the point of redefining who am I.

It’s unlikely to be a radical change, but as I hinted at in my previous post, more and more I find myself looking for things which will (in my opinion) enhance the ‘me’ I want to be.

I don’t have a fixed image of my future self but it’s slowly taking shape, And even though I know that that process won’t ever stop (it’s part of who I am to want to improve) the process is definitely the important part of my journey.

bookmark_borderWhat do we want?

At TCUK12 this year, I chatted with several people about authoring tools. Vendors, other technical writers, managers, I asked the same two questions, again and again.

What authoring application do you use, and why do you use it?

The answers were illuminating, interesting and always useful. There are many, many options out there, catering to many different needs, and all of them have a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Alas, no matter how hard I tried, regardless of how many ways I tried to bend our requirements, all of those conversations led me to the same conclusion.

No-one out there builds what we want so we may have to build it ourselves.

As part of improvements to our content, one of my team has led the charge to restructure our information. She has a passion for information architecture and devised a three pronged approach to our content. You can either navigate in by role, by product area or… by something else we haven’t yet decided upon.

We’ve audited the topics we have and applied some simple structuring decisions and it is looking good so far. The problem we will soon have is that we will need to build this new structure and make it usable by our customers.

What we would like is to be able to tag our topics, and use those tags to present a default structure to our information. The tags would also allow users to filter the topics they see and, either by addition or subtraction, create a unique set of information for their needs. Ultimately this would lead to personalisation of content in a basic form, but that could easily be enhanced to provide a smarter take on content for each user.

Alas it seems that, without doing a lot of customising of an XML (most likely DITA) based system we won’t get near that and even the products that get close require a compromise somewhere. Most of the time it would be, for the team of writers, a step back to a less friendly interface, and more exposure to the underlying technology of the tool they are using. At present Author-it provides a simple authoring environment that allows the writers to concentrate on writing content.

But perhaps that is the point. Maybe it’s time to try a different set of tools, adopt new working practices, take on a the bigger challenge.

bookmark_borderSo that was TCUK12

It’s been a few days since I got home after the Technical Communications Conference this year, and I’ve been digesting and mulling over some of the ideas and thoughts gathered from the speakers and conversations.

The conference was in a new location, Newcastle, and that brought a different feel to the event. Hard to put my finger on it but it felt a little more business like, or maybe just a little less social? Not sure, and as ever my experience will be different from others.

Something that hasn’t changed was the value. It remains an excellent opportunity to learn from your peers, industry experts, and if nothing else it’s great to hear that we are doing the right things or just have the same problems as everyone else.

A few standout presentations from me, Leah Guren (whose workshop I attended on the Tuesday) kicked off the conference in great style. Passionate, funny, upbeat, everything that we can occasionally seem to lack in our profession here in the UK. Ray Gallon and Scott Abel backed that up with some excellent presentations that expanded the scope of what we can, and should, be doing.

It took me a while to realise it but the one thing I didn’t get this year was an overall theme. Not an official one, but typically there is one stream of thought that seems to be prevalent. I think the closest to that would be ‘Structure’ (as a strategy) and I wonder if, perhaps, that that particular stream of thought hasn’t yet hit a tipping point?

Still pondering that, and many other, things, one of which is that I really need to be blogging here more! Time will tell if I can stick to that.

bookmark_borderQuality time

I’m at a conference, having dinner with some of the attendees. I’ve met them before, know them well enough on a professional basis and talk turns to Twitter and Facebook.

Turns out the three of us are developing very similar relationships with Twitter and Facebook, namely that we now approach each service with a view on how much quality we will get from them.

Twitter is the easiest one to tackle. I have two Twitter accounts, a personal one which is useful (in a limited way) for keeping up to date with the goings-on of a mish-mash of friends and colleagues, and a professional one to which I push interesting articles but in which I don’t spend all that much time. It is becoming increasingly easy to avoid Twitter.

Why? Because it rarely offers me anything of deep quality. From time to time someone will say something I will follow up, or a link will be posted that leads to something interesting but most of the time, and this isn’t a bad thing just the nature of the beast, it is transient.

Facebook for me is slightly different, it is more focused on closer friends and family but fundamentally still has a similar transient feel. If I don’t check it for a couple of days I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything.

What we realised at dinner last night is that we all crave more from the time we use. Twitter and Facebook can suck hours from your day for scant reward. There is little nourishment there.

I mentioned that I’ve started looking to services such as LongReads and Byliner to get longer things to read, things which have substance and which, after reading, I feel like I’ve learned something or certainly spent an hour or so lost in something interesting. It’s also why I backed the Matter project on kickstarter.

Is it an age thing? As I get older, am I putting more emphasis on ‘me’ time and wanting that to be substantive and meaningful? Perhaps.

Or perhaps it’s just a kick back against the constant stream of information, the overloaded streams that flow into my computer, my phone, demanding my attention.

This blog, at one point, was called “Informationally Overloaded” and I think, these days, it’s becoming more and more true.