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I would appreciate your thoughts about the direction
of technical writing departments and practices in the
near future. Specifically, I invite your comments
about my growing conviction that we will see a growing
methodology shift driven by increased understanding of
the benefits of creating documentation that is easy to
re-use and maintain. It appears clear that this will
in most cases be through employment of XML and
repository tools based upon this technology.
I for one would welcome a shift away from the present
practice of having each technical writer spend a
substantial part of each day consumed with simple
formatting issues. This becomes such a burden that we
have discussion threads regarding "whether we should
clean up 'clunky English' after we have finished
formatting"-as if this were not a very basic part of
our jobs! (I would even assert that you cannot
properly format a document until and unless you have
it rendered into good English!)
Next, I find too many documents have distressingly
little time spent on fact-checking, completeness and
organization issues. Somewhere, writers must get the
time and the opportunity to polish the content of the
documents much more in the face of decreasing time
available.
Thus, I believe that in the most successful shops, the
bulk of writers may be best off using a basic XML
authoring tool that makes perhaps no more than ten to
fifteen tags easy to apply as you write-but without
any margins, headers and footers, etc.
As the documents are written properly, then, they
would be sent to a limited number of formatting
specialists who would transform the XML documents into
the output formats. Thus, there would be consistent
styles, better management of templates, and the
documents themselves would be far easier to maintain
in the future.
Does this sound reasonable to you? If not, why not?
Thanks for your opinions,
David Neeley
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