Meeting the New Demands of Content Creation

I’ve been told that I think too much like a writer. Well, I suppose that’s true – after all, I’ve been writing all my life and professionally for more years than you will get me to admit. This post is in the “I’m thinking like a writer” realm and you’ll just have to indulge me…again.

The art of writing for technology – whether the content is explanatory, hype, detailed techno-speak, instruction, etc. – is undergoing a significant metamorphosis right now. I know what you’re thinking, “It’s been changing for years.” And yes, that’s true. But let me explain.

The BW Days

In the days BW (before the web), writers wrote copy. We were sometimes called copywriters. Even if we were writing technical pieces, we were just writing. We were taught to think in words and maybe in pictures. Personally, I can’t draw my way out of a box, so I have always worked with professional artists who could take my words and translate them into glorious illustrations. In comparison to today’s demands, it was a simple trade. I would learn about something by reading specifications, talking to subject matter experts, playing with products. Then, I would take all of that information and make it understandable for someone else. I really enjoyed this. The more complicated the concept, technology, or product, the better. It was a challenge that I relished.

Writers as Coders

As technology has advanced, one of the most important developments was the advent of XML, structured authoring, and single-sourcing. My words (copy) are now separate from the format (how it looks) on the screen or page. Separating out format from the copy is a great idea. It allows me to reuse and repurpose content, without worrying about Heading 1 being Helvetica 14 Bold, and the normal flow being Times New Roman 11. Style sheets define my headings (so, for example, in one style sheet Heading 1 can be defined as Helvetica 14 Bold, while in another, Heading 1 can be defined as Calibri 10 Italic).

In order to use structured tools effectively, though, I needed to become a quasi-coder. I needed to learn about metadata and tags, and how to put these little technical hickeys (that’s a technical term, by the way), into my content. Without them, I cannot marry my copy to the designated style. I can no longer care solely about the words. Now I have to care about the structure, the semantic tagging, and more. Sure, we have tools that help make this easier. But if you really want to be an expert at your web content creation job, you’re well-served to learn about the tags and how they work. Case in point, I’m using WordPress right now. And while I can use the Visual interface to write this post, understanding the HTML allows me to do much more with my formatting and certainly allows me to fix the frequent hiccups that I cannot address using just the Visual interface.

In addition to understanding tagging and structure, structured authoring and content reuse forces me to change the way I think about my content. Content reuse means that I do not know where my content will be used next. Sure, I can define the title as Heading 1, and so on. But, from an information point of view, I have absolutely no idea who is going to use the chunk I just created and where it is going to end up. This means that I can no longer think linearly. This is important – and a step that I see customers forget all the time. When I am writing content that is intended for reuse, I can never be sure that the previous information I have provided (or information that I will get to in the future) will be included with the segment that my reader is looking at right now.

I cannot say, “As previously mentioned in Chapter 4,” or “This will be explained in detail in Part 2.” I have no idea if the referenced pieces will be included with the current chunk. I must treat each topic of information as if it is completely and totally separate from the rest of the piece. This forces me to use a different way of thinking about content creation. It is a different way of sitting at my computer and imagining my copy.

If you don’t change the way you create the content, you will not be able to reuse the content. It is really that simple. And to change the way you create the content, you must rethink everything from your outline through your terminology.

Writers as Coders, Artists, Animators, Videographers, Sound Engineers

But, it doesn’t end there. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on digital publishing lately. We are working with many of our customers to create eBooks. And here’s the thing – to create a compelling eBook, you must do more than just write and think up good pictures. You need to think interactively. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you are imagining your new eBook, you need to think, plan, and create enhancements and interactions for your reader to watch and play with. If all you are doing is taking your whitepaper and putting it into an ePub3 format, you’ve missed the point.

The point of eBooks is to add the cool stuff: the pictures that you can swipe and rotate around to see the back, the calculators that let your reader enter interest rates and mortgage amounts to calculate their payments, the videos that show the repair people how to fix your dishwasher, not just the procedural steps.

And this, my friends, is big. It is bigger than you might think, unless you’ve been creating a lot of enhanced and interactive eBooks these days. Your words are simply not enough. And your flat, 2-D Illustrator images are not enough. eBooks give us the opportunity and the mandate to go beyond.

So, now, you are not just a writer. You are not just a writer and a coder. Now, you are a writer, a coder, a videographer, an animator, and a sound engineer. At minimum, you must be planning where and how to use these additional goodies in your content. I don’t know about you, but I’m not Steven Spielberg. I don’t naturally think about a cool video to include in my (former) whitepaper. I don’t consider objects to spin around and have fly across my reader’s screen.

So this is hard. And it’s challenging. And it is the wave of the future (for now). We need to start thinking more interactively and more 3-dimensionally. I have no answers as to how to do this. I suggest that if you are going to be creating real eBooks soon, you should start “experiencing” some of the cool eBooks that have been released. Nancy Duarte recently released her fabulous book, “Resonate,” for the iPad. Theodore Gray has a book called “Elements,” that shows all kinds of really cool things you can do in your interactive eBook. Get these. Read and watch them. And start dreaming.

Maybe we need to go to art school. Or videography school. Or animation school. I don’t know. What I do know is that our job is expanding and to keep up, we need to start thinking much differently.

http://www.sdicorp.com/Resources/Blog/articleType/AuthorView/authorID/24/lkunz.aspx Larry Kunz

Thanks, Val. That’s a great summary of the current state of technical communication. We’re no longer producing documents. Now we’re producing an interactive, multimedia experience. And, as you say, most of us have a lot to learn if we want to to become good at it.

That said, we’re still the best-qualified people in the world to do this. Skills like audience analysis and task orientation — skills that we already have — are going to be just as vital as videography, animation, and sound engineering.
- http://www.contentrules.com Val Swisher
  
  Thanks, Larry. I think that the skills technical communicators have for organization, structure, task orientation, and so on, will remain important – always. Like John says in his comment, we need to learn to think more interactively and more mulit-media-ly (I made that up). It’s no longer just the words – it is a total experience. What a great challenge! How fun to advance in this way! I am looking forward to being so creative.
http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/ KareAnderson

What technology / platforms are your clients using to create eBooks?
- http://www.contentrules.com Val Swisher
  
  The recent projects have been large-scale, multi-book conversions from FrameMaker to ePub and .Mobi. For these projects, we worked with a conversion partner because we were working with hundreds and hundreds of pages.
  
  We are also starting to work in iBooks Author for some of them. The simple things are really simple to do in iBooks Author. The cool interactive stuff, not so simple. Have you selected a platform? You were looking at Vook, if I recall?
http://twitter.com/KatherineAndes Katherine Andes

The writer makes an interesting observation about content that might be pulled out of context … but I haven’t seen that anywhere. It would have been nice to have an example. There’s still plenty of linear writing going on, the article above included.
- http://www.contentrules.com Val Swisher
  
  Thanks for your comment, Katherine. We have many customers who are using structured authoring, XML, and a CMS to single-source information. For example, customers will all standardize on a single preface that can be put into a variety of documents. That preface may or may not be appropriate for a particular document, hence it is pulled out of context. Another example would be a section of a document that describes opening the contents of a box (for a hardware product). Or a marketing piece that describes features/benefits and is reused in data sheets and web copy. And with the advent of mobile, more of our content can/will/should be reused for different screen sizes, devices.
  
  Blog posts, by design, are linear. I’ve never seen a blog post that was reused, except for people quoting other blogs or hyperlinks. Thanks again for your comments.
Joseph Campo

Our company is making this new “Experience” push on the sales/marketing side. My Doc team reports to the User Experience manager. We hope to integrate ourselves more with the Development side, while giving input on the Experience side. It’s exciting, but very challenging.
http://twitter.com/bsaunders Barbara R Saunders

Interesting discussion. I think there’s more unpacking to do. Writers have always done a number of distinct things. Among them capture ideas in words, capture information in words, capture data in words, put ideas and data into a format that allows them to be used as information, and so on. Some “creative” writers (and, I’m sure, many SME authors) still write longhand or dictate to typists. Word processers let writers set their type.

Writers use(d) typewriters and wordprocessors and dictation machines to do their work because that’s what history handed them. The same is true of today’s tools. Various writing JOBS require whatever tools those writing jobs require, but I believe it’s futile to expect writers as a category to “become” coders, videographers, etc. I can learn to use tools, even some complicated tools, but I am no more a coder than I am a basketball player for the NBA. (As an aside: Like writers, videographers and coders are artists with particular native grammars.)

The fact that marketing copy might later be used in a data sheet (or vice versa) certainly changes the way the marketing people, the tech support people, and the writers must think about copy. (Avoiding “Refer to Chapter 12″ is a great example.) But – except in limited circumstances – it’s putting the cart before the horse if backend mechanisms rather than substance drive content creation processes and writers are selected primarily for their ability to be very technical.

IDEAS come first. I’d argue that many or most people of past generations are drawn to writing because they are idea-and-language people, and to technical writing because we enjoy technical content, the benefits of technology, or the positions available in the field.

A concrete example: I worked on a set of manuals for a client. They desperately needed a content reuse strategy that was not on the radar! I was copying, pasting, rechecking, correcting, and finding inconsistencies in the same darn sentences, over and over again. Yet – “consistency” wasn’t what made customers in focus groups rate the work I did higher than work the product team had done: it was old-fashioned writing skills — tone, word choice, empathy. My ability to focus effectively on that for that project (while still writing long, long memos about how they could reuse and organize!) depended on not being overly burdened with a gazillion details that require a coder’s way of directing my attention.
- http://www.contentrules.com Val Swisher
  
  Barbara – Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply.
  
  You are correct – technical writers cannot be expected to learn the tools and craft of things such as videography. My point, though, is that in order to make full use of the new formats and capabilities that we can now use to create content, we need to think about the content differently. I am unaccustomed to thinking about videos to put into a section of a manual (for example), or an interactive piece for a document. I might not be the person who actually creates the animation, but I need to know it is a possibility and start thinking about the appropriate application.
  
  Thanks again!

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