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Subject:Re: What good is it if you can't find it? From:"Jo Francis Byrd" <jbyrd -at- byrdwrites -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 15 Nov 2002 13:32:57 -0600
Both of Susan's examples support one of my pet contentions: the most
accurate and complete information in the world is useless if you can't find
it, and chances are, the only way you're going to find it is via an index. A
GOOD index. In the examples Susan cited, the lack of comprehensive indexing
made the information nearly impossible to find.
If we're going to write accurate (and consistent!) content, we should also
index it. And index it well.
Jo Byrd
----- Original Message -----
From: "Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher5 -at- cox -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 1:22 PM
Subject: What good is it if you can't find it?
In the content v. design wars, chalk up two points for design.
Beth Kane needed to know how to turn off the drawing canvas in Word. Well, I
knew where the checkbox was because I'd stumbled across it, and the What's
this? help works just fine. But there was no index entry link to AutoShapes,
where Beth was looking for it, so the content might as well not have
existed.
I just upgraded to Corel 11 and if you've ever used Corel in the past, you
know they supply a bunch of symbol fonts that you can display on a tablet
and drag and drop into a drawing. I couldn't find that feature anywhere in
Corel 11. Turns out they changed the name of the function from Insert Symbol
to Insert Character. A link to the help topic from a keyword "symbol" would
have made my life easy. I eventually
found out about the switch at the online knowledge base.
Please note, I am not dismissing content as non-essential.ut if all you want
is content, you can ask an engineer for it. Content is absolutely useless if
you can't find it.
The art and skill of technical writing is a combination of information and
design and you cannot supply one without the other and still call yourself a
technical writer. And no, I'm not talking about "font fondling", I'm talking
about good, solid, information design that makes the content accessible to
the user.
My two cents on a *way* too serious Friday. ;-)
-Sue Gallagher
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