Ouch! Don’t desert me Ouch! Please don’t hurt me
One of my duties at The New Job is bringing the online help system for their main application up-to-date. It’s a small company, so I’m the only writer there, and I was mentioning on my pal Christina’s blog how much I appreciated editors from my days as a tech writer. Hey, you gotta love someone whose job it is to make you look good. :-)
Daniela Meleo saw my post there and pointed me to a book written by Jean Weber, a tech editor/writer of long standing in Australia about editing online help systems. I had a quick look at it and it was immediately clear that the author had plenty of experience in the trenches, because her first chapter, after telling you about the importance of planning, task analysis, outlining, etc., has a section entitled "What do you do when there’s no plan and no time?" When I saw that, I plunked down the eight bucks for the downloadable version of the book. It’s also good to have something that’s a bit more recent than my other reference on the topic of online help, William Horton’s classic Designing and Writing Online Documentation. My edition of that is the 1990 one, but even the 1994 would be getting a little long in tooth at this point. Incidentally, I took a course from Horton in multimedia on the cheap back years ago when I worked for AT&T. He’s an excellent teacher. I wish he would update the book. But Weber’s book looks like filling the gap quite nicely, thank you.
Posted at 9:19 PM
I saw Horton at the 1998 STC meeting in Anaheim and I agree that he is an impressive speaker and teacher. He was giving a very interesting talk about online presentation and information reuse, but he kept talking about some obscure Standard for presentations and training that I have yet to hear about again. It makes me think that he went off into some backwater pool of theory and never came out.
Just a hypothesis. I haven’t really kept up on this stuff, So maybe I’m missing out on something important.
Posted by lillbrother at 9:39 PM, July 9, 2002 [Link]