Category Archives: Structured writing

Post related to structured writing, content engineering, and the manipulation of content with algorithms generally.

Time to move to multi-sourcing

Single sourcing has been the watchword of technical communication for the last several decades. We have never fully made it work. A pair of seminal posts by prominent members of the community give me cause to hope that we may be ready to move past it. Single sourcing is about the relationship between sources and… Read More »

The incomplete bridge

In the Top Gear Patagonia Special, the presenters come upon an incomplete bridge and have to construct a ramp to get their cars across. This is a great metaphor for technical communication, and, indeed, communication of all kinds: the incomplete bridge. Technical communication is often described as a bridge between the expert and the user.… Read More »

DocBook resurgent: what it tells us about structured writing and component content management

A new XML-based content management system that is not based on DITA. Bet you didn’t see that coming. But I think it tells us something interesting about the two sides of structured writing. Tom Johnson’s recent sponsored post explains the origins of Paligo, a relatively new CCMS out of Sweden. Paligo was developed by a company… Read More »

Designing for Feedback

We were discussing the biggest challenges in Tech Comm at the last STC Toronto brunch and we all seemed to agree that the difficulty getting feedback on the effectiveness of the content we create is the biggest challenge. The things that really matter in technical communication is whether users can achieve their goals after finding… Read More »

Why we need constrainable lightweight markup languages

This post is in response to a Twitter conversation that started with:   “Why You Shouldn’t Use “Markdown” for Documentation” by @ericholscher:https://t.co/lZYz8u0dKN@mbakeranalecta #TechComm #XML #markdown — Stefan Gentz (@stefangentz) June 3, 2016 This led to a discussion about extensibility and constraints in markup languages. Markdown is a pretty simple lightweight markup language (and popular for… Read More »

Can Content be Engineered; Can Writers be Certified?

tl;dr: We can apply engineering methods to content development, but we do not have the body of proven algorithms or known-good data to justify formal certification of communication professionals the way we have for doctors and engineers. We talk about content engineering. I call myself a content engineer sometimes. But can content really be engineered? Is… Read More »

Writing Excellence Through Domain Awareness

A little while back, Tom Johnson posted an article entitled Seeing things from the perspective of a learner in which he says, “The balance between knowing and not knowing is the tension that undergirds the whole profession of technical writing.”. I think that is absolutely correct. The point, after all, is to assist the reader on their… Read More »