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FacebookWith All This Fuss About Tools, Three Best Practice Attitudes
August 13th, 2008 | Posted in Technical Writing 14 Comments »
A variety of tools
A few weeks ago I started experimenting with surveys in my sidebar, mostly informal, and mainly to try out different WordPress plugins. Little did I know my surveys would incite so much controversy.
The latest poll, “Which Authoring Tool Is Best for You?” has received nearly 600 votes from people around the world, and was discussed at length on the HATT listserv. In all this discussion, I’ve realized one thing: technical writers are passionate about the tools they use.
“Passionate” is probably too positive a term. More like fanatical or zealous – but really technical writers span the spectrum with attitudes here. Some are fanatical, others are heavily invested, a few are open-minded, others are confused, and some are downright nasty.
The war over tools isn’t unique to the field of tech comm. It’s human nature to cling to a brand and promote it as the best. Think Dodge versus Ford trucks, Harley versus Yamaha motorcycles, BYU versus the University of Utah (replace with your local college rivalries), the Yankees versus the Red Sox, Mac versus PC, iPhone versus BlackBerry, West Coast versus East Coast, Twitter versus Plurk. The war of brands is pervasive and probably dates back to cavemen promoting different types of clubs to maim their kill.
Even as I write this post, someone has just twittered, “Movable Type, the most powerful blog software out there, hit 4.2 today.” Is Movable Type really the most powerful? Or is it WordPress, or some other?
Replace the word “software” with any other product and you catch the spirit of the branding war. Ford, the most powerful truck out there. iPhone, the most powerful mobile device. The Yankees, the most powerful baseball team to ever ….
An Alternative Point of View
Although tools seem to play a significant role in technical authoring, some people disagree. Bill Swallow is “shaking [his] head at all the tools survey nonsense going on lately.” He feels tools should play a minimal role in any project, not foregrounding the more important aspects of content generation. Spending 20% of your time formatting, structuring, designing and styling your content with a tool is “a huge waste of time,” he says.
Instead, tools should play “a very little role in our day to day work (or should).” Writers should simply choose the right tool for the job — like a skilled mechanic selecting a wrench from a toolbox — and go to work writing instead of wrestling with the tool.
Perhaps if everyone could work like this, we wouldn’t so easily slip into Pharisee-Saducee-like tool discussions. But while this scenario is ideal, it’s hard to implement because not everyone has the technical prowess of a Bill Swallow to make a tool eat out of your hand. In setting up single sourcing scenarios, or structured authoring templates, the tools and process can be a monster you battle. (Of course, once you set everything up, it’s no longer such a monster.)
Best Practice Attitudes
My discussion about tools isn’t conclusive nor is it meant to be. So instead I give you three “best practice attitudes” to have towards tools.
1. Embrace Tool Learning
You’re a technical writer, right? This is what you do – learn confusing software applications that engineers create. Learning tools should be your strength, not your weakness.
To make life easier, try not to learn a tool all at once. It’s better to take small bites over a series of weeks rather than pull an all-nighter under pressure.
2. Recognize that the “Best Tool” Is Relative
Certain tools are right for certain situations, skillsets, and corporate contexts. What’s right for you may not be right for another.
For example, WordPress may be tremendously powerful, but many users can’t understand it, so Blogger might be more appropriate, even though it’s less powerful. Similarly, DITA may be the way to go if you have heavy reuse, but if you only have one manual and no reuse, it would be overkill. Camtasia is great if you’re creating screencast tutorials, but Captivate excels at interactivity. Framemaker is better at long documents, but Word is fine if the job’s shorter. Right is relative.
3. Expose Knowledge Gaps
The next time a “best tool” war flares up, ask each person if they’ve used the other tool, and if so, to what extent. When we admit the limits of our knowledge, we’re more apt to be humble and open-minded when it comes to tool comparisons.
Conclusion
In this post, I have not taken a position of tool agnosticism. I do think that some tools are better for certain jobs than others. But we can be a lot more level-headed and open-minded when it comes to discussions about tools.
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photo from Flickr
Tags: AuthorIt, brands, Flare, RoboHelp, stubbornness, tools
I agree with Bill to a degree, that the wittering on about which tool is best is daft (I’ve blogged about this too, the tool is not important!)
That said, the tool IS an integral part of how we work and what we produce, whether we like it or not there is no utopian workplace where the tool is completely transparent.
Gordons last blog post..Why technical reviews fail
A point I’ll be making in an upcoming presentation is that the tools we choose and use are more for our convenience than anything else. They definitely don’t ensure the quality of the content, which is what readers really care about.
The tools can make it easier for technical communicators to do the job. But regardless of whether we’re using a word processor, a publishing app, or a text editor and XML it’s the writer who is key.
I have a few more to add:
1-Consider the whole of the tool; don’t discount it just because it doesn’t perform 1 of 10 of your needs. There are always workarounds.
2-Be pragmatic about history:
a. Remember, in the software industry, applications evolve. Keep yourself updated on a tool’s evolution because one release might make it 100% perfect for your needs. The other side of this is sometimes you have to dig into an application to make it work.
b. Don’t be emotionally attached to tools: Just because MS Word deleted your 120 page history dissertation in 1991 causing you 2 weeks of grief and tears doesn’t mean it’s not much better now.
–
I think this is indicative of a bigger issue: In the last 10 years most of us (anyone who uses a computer) have been forced to live with tools that evolve. Some people deal very well with this, others don’t. The others have a problem, find a solution, and don’t want the environment to change.
w0s last blog post..Firefox 3 adoption rate and the culture of the Internet
Since I was mentioned throughout this blog (Hi, Bill Swallow here), I thought I should respond. Yes, those were my words, but they were quoted a bit out of context.
I was shaking my head at the tools survey nonsense because the chatter around it had gotten completely out of hand. Are tools important? Absolutely. Should they be a primary focus of the job? No. Should you attribute a big chunk of a project’s success to the tool you use? No. Why? Because in the end it’s about how you use it. Successful adoption and all that jazz.
There’s a balance here, and what people tend to forget is that they are the fulcrum. Tools play an important role if implemented correctly because they can make the job easier. Give a construction worker a chisel and hammer instead of a jackhammer and the work will slow down to a crawl. Likewise, grab anyone off the street and hand them a jackhammer and you can bet they’ll heavily botch the job.
Knowledge, ability, and implementation are key when using tools to do a job. This hasn’t changed since mankind first threw a rock at its prey.
I made another remark on the HATT list that Tom neglected to include. I gave tools equal weighting to the document review process. Why? Because both play a small but vital role in successfully completing a project. Without a review that’s conducted on-time and properly to flush out the problems with the documentation, you have a buggy documentation release. And without a tool to help you do the job correctly, you risk the same or a slipped deadline.
But a successful project is much more than the right tool used or the review done right. There are many, many other factors at play, and at the center of each one is the writer. No matter what tools you use or processes you put in place, if you have a poor writer in the middle of it, the project is at risk.
I could go on and on here, but I’d rather not. Please feel free to look at the archived posts on HATT to get more context around my comments. In short, if your project goals are complete, accurate, well-written documentation and you attribute a huge factor in the success of that project to your tool of choice, you’ve really short-changed all the other factors that went into creating those excellent docs, particularly your and your team’s own contributions.
Yours in balance,
Bill
techcommdoods last blog post..Weekend at Jeff’s
Bill, thanks for commenting here and expanding on your position about tools. I wasn’t trying to quote you out of context. I think what you say is fairly agreeable. In this post I was mostly musing about why tool discussions get to be so bitter. However, I ended up cutting most of those musings out and instead focusing on your thoughts because I think what you said in the exchange on the HATT listserv was more thought-provoking.
w0, good points about keeping perspective with the evolution of tools. Your line about losing 120 pages of a disssertation in 1991 made me laugh. I have to wonder whether that comes from personal experience. When I was in college, I had numerous experiences where Word suddenly crashed or lost my document and I was temporarily devastated. But it hasn’t happened to me much now. Maybe it’s because I don’t use Word as heavily or because Word 2007 is much better.
Passionate, fanatical, zealous, etc. reflect strong emotion. Are mechanics equally emotional about their toolbox? Or carpenters about their toolbelt? Probably not so much for tool but maybe they have a favorite or two. Why is there a difference in their “emotional investment”? The mechanic/carpenter/tradesperson has a wide variety of tools to draw from, each with specific and reasonably limited scope of usefulness, and knows what each is used for and what each is not used for; the right tool for the right job. How often would a tradesperson be expected by their superior to do comprehensive, quality work using the wrong tools, just a subset of all the tools best suited for the task, or even just a Swiss Army Knife? Seldom, I suspect. But if stranded on a desert island with only the subset they would adapt and probably begin to grow more “attached” to certain tools because of the success they have had with them. I agree with Bill that tools should not be so important but without them we, like my hypothetical tradespeople, would be unable to accomplish many/most of our tasks.
Technical Communicators (Writers being a subset, IMHO) are frequently called upon to “make a silk purse from sow’s ear”, to accomplish a task with limited or awkward (inadequate, inappropriate, insufficient, unreasonable) resources. I have taken jobs where I was expected to use a particular tool/suite even though it wasn’t best suited for the deliverable. When I wrestle the Flare (insert tool/suite name of choice here) monster into submission to accomplish something it wasn’t designed for, I gladly place my foot on the heaving chest of the beast, beat my breasts with vigor, and proclaim myself victorious (because no one else will probably ever know or appreciate the heck I went through to get there). I guess that makes me passionate, fanatical, and zealous too.
Tom’s Best Practice Attitudes are a great start to a healthy and productive mental state. In a recent post, Tapping Your Creative Juices (http://www.drexplain.com/isv-kaizen-blog/productivity/tapping-your-creative-juices/) I describe examples of creative “outside the box” thinking. Our industry demands this skill and the efforts we go through to develop and implement creative solutions come with an emotional, chest-beating, price tag. Sometimes that creativity needs to be applied to the deliverable; clear, concise, and complete content. Sometimes that creativity comes into play just to get the tool foisted upon us to cooperate with the project plan. If the Flare/RoboHelp/whatever suites were a compilation of best-of-breed components which could be swapped in and out as better components come along, we could treat them like toolboxes and toolbelts instead of Swiss Army Knives.
Craig Prichard
Technical Communicator
craig.prichard@gmail.com
I find myself repeating #2 almost twice a week nowadays. Great post.
…Although, I’m ashamed to admit I did a double take when I saw “Pharisee-Sadducee” there. LOL!
Erikas last blog post..Miami Web Design
Whew – Tom, Bill, it’s been quite the discussion.
Tom – reading the HATT list reminds me of last year when I growsed about RoboHelp not being what it used to be… and reaped the whirlwind.
The survey results that you experienced are solidly in line with trends and statistics that I was following since 2006. Summing up those trends, even though there is a cool bundle called Technical Communication, the most useful tool for help authoring has shifted.
One unanswered question you posed on the list was simply brilliant and I hope this sums up the detail – how much time does everyone really spend doing a project, and can a tool help reduce that time?
According to Mike Hamilton, my source for my podcast last year, MadCap’s focus has been on improving the workflow.
It’s simply a better hammer/saw/ratchet at this point. There are people who are wizards at a lot of other tools, but when you’re trying to shuffle between disparate programs to gather images, media files, and other such things time and productivity can’t help but be impacted.
Charless last blog post..Save Yourself $700 and a Headache | Is MadCap Flare Now Leading Adobe RoboHelp In HAT War?
I need the most the first practice attitudes that called Embrace Tool Learning!
[...] fact, just this week Bill Swallow and Tom Johnson had a key debate regarding tool usage, focusing on time savings from tools versus time spent on [...]
красиво, сделал! Благодарю!!!
Спасибо. Добавлено в закладки
Computer tools are very necessary for productivity.