(no subject)

[wshaffer]

The most recent issue of intercom (the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication) has an article titled "Adapt or Die", which contains this striking statement from Emma Hamer (I've trimmed it a bit in the middle where the ellipsis is, but I've done my best not to distort the meaning):

One of the most significant trends in the profession is the shift from unstructured to structured authoring...Yet early research indicates that approximately 1 in 5, perhaps even 1 in 4, people currently working as technical communicators will not be able to grasp the concepts of structured authoring.

First, a peeve: Having printed this startling assertion, did intercom provide any sort of citation so that we could go look at this early research for ourselves? No. I'm going to do a bit of searching later, and see if I can turn something up.

Second, does anyone find it ironic that a profession that specializes in understanding and communicating unfamiliar concepts is allegedly facing a situation where as much as 1/4 of its work force may be left behind because they can't understand a new set of concepts?

Speaking as someone who is in the midst of transitioning from unstructured to structured authoring, I can vouch for its representing a huge conceptual shift. It's changing my job in all kinds of interesting ways, and some of them have not been easy to adapt to. Still, I find the blanket statement that some technical communicators "will not be able to grasp the concepts of structured authoring" startling. I pretty much believe that anyone can learn anything with sufficient motivation and a good teacher. Keeping your job is pretty good motivation. Maybe it's the teachers that are lacking?

Comments

[sbuchler.livejournal.com]

What is structured authoring? I've never _heard_ of it... 8-S

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Neither have I, and I'm a technical writer!

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Heh. Although structured authoring seems to be a big buzzword out here these days, I can't help but notice that the only tech writers who seem to have actually been doing it for a long time have all worked for IBM. (We had to hire a former IBM employee to help teach us how to do it.)

I've attempted to explain it in my reply to sbuchler, though it is one of those things that makes a lot more sense once you've seen an example.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. It's also something that is only going to be needed in certain contexts. I can safely say that not a single one of my employers has ever needed that range of options, and wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Exactly - for many projects, it's the equivalent of hunting mice with an elephant gun.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Structured authoring is basically a method of tagging the stuff you write with lots of metadata about its semantic meaning, usually using some form of XML-based markup language. This has the principal advantage of separating the content itself from the way the content is presented. (Think of how a web browser turns a bunch of HTML tags and text into a pretty web page.) This lets you write something once and deliver it in a bunch of different output formats: PDF, web, cell phone, etc. It also lets you write something once and then reuse it in a bunch of different contexts - so if I've written a really awesome definition of a widget, I can have that inserted into every document we create that talks about widgets, and if I change it, it's instantly updated everywhere. It also makes translation much much cheaper (which was a big reason why we've adopted it.)

Because you're writing in a markup language that has to be processed by a computer program to make pretty output, it means that you have to be a bit stricter about the way you structure things than if you were just opening up a word processor and writing. Things have to come in a particular order. Hence the name "structured authoring".

[sbuchler.livejournal.com]

makes sense. Thanks!