Nobody Wants To Be the Last Writer of a Failed Document...

For better or worse, my second project at the company for which I recently started working is to produce their first attempt at creating and maintaining some sort of requirement documentation.

I’ve found the experience similar to levitating barnyard animals. You can levitate cattle, can’t you?

For me, the whole process has essentially boiled down to the fact that no-one is paying attention and I’m not sure anyone could say precisely why I’ve been given this quest for the holy specification, and neither could I. The environment is all wrong for the type of document that someone, somewhere has assigned me to write from morning to night. However, perhaps someone out there can make use out of these pieces of advice:

1. Make sure there is a compelling reason to be writing documentation, because, trust me, it’s expensive. For some reason, I’ve yet to receive a project to work on in my downtime and there is tons of downtime. If you’re a technical writer working on one of these documents, you have as much control over the weather as you do what belongs in the requirements document—the content is all determined by other people. You are just the goon they have bamboozled into taking whatever they write and making it into a giant document. Is that a harsh way to put it? Yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true

2. Find out who the audience is and who the key players are. Once you know these things, then pray that they are kind enough to keep you up-to-date and possibly even read what you have written. If you can’t discover who the key-players are or if you do and none of them are interested in your document, try and find out why the hell you’re writing the document. If your still writing the document and nobody still sends their info to you, then you have entered a, ummmmm what’s it called? O’ ya—a world of pain.

3. So far, my favorite article on writing specifications is this one:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is208/s02/ReqsDoc.pdf
and before you ask; no, I do not know why this person decided to format their paragraph text in italics. My inclination is that she went crazy writing product specifications.

Error! Reference source not found.

Why is it that nobody mentions that Word will absolutely destroy your cross-references if you do nearly anything with the references target. If you can't make a reference and then move the target around and have it still point to that target, then what is the point?

A Color Palette That Prints Well In Black and White

A month or so ago, I ran into a problem while writing some documentation. I wanted to use colors to divide different sections of a screenshot, but I knew that many users would be reading the document after it was printed in black and white. It took me quite a bit of time to come up with the solution, but I eventually found five colors that print as different shades of grey. Here is an image of my findings:

Replacing All of Your Double Spaces After Sentences with Single Spaces in Word 2003.

So, yesterday I posted about how the world has been thrown upside down and people now use single spaces after sentences. Today, I'm taking my own medicine and have begun retraining myself--but what about my million documents with double spaces after sentences?

Well, I've made a simple wildcard expression to use with Word's Find and Replace function to replace all of the double spaces after sentences with single sentences.

If you want to throw caution to the wind and replace all instances of two adjacent spaces with a single space, go to "Find and Replace" and enter the following string minus the quote marks:
" {2}" in the replace field enter a single space. If you don't catch the drift of the quotes the string would read, space open bracer 2 close bracer.

If you want to only replace double spaces after periods, then enter: . {2}

Lifehacker just now wrote their article on mind mapping? Amazing...

I can't believe that lifehacker, of all websites, has just now gotten around to writing an article on mind mapping. I guess it was a free floating idea that finally settled on this slow news week--for them atleast, since their name isn't votehacker, they won't be covering Karl Roves resignation.

Here is lifehacker's take on the greatness that is mind mapping:
A Beginner's Guide to Mind Mapping Meetings

Another excellent article with a few links about mind mapping is written by the authors of Creating Passionate Users, a great blog throughout:
Why I Want a Tablet PC

single spaces between sentences? you must be kidding!

If you're 25 and you grew up in a small town, I can nearly guarantee that your "typing instructor" has given you a terrible habit, because I've read four times this week that single spaces after sentences are now the norm (and probably have been forever. Of course, I was so shocked that I immediately set about putting twenty minutes into it. So, a long, long time ago, people once used these ancient devises that weighed more than solid iron to type papers and all sorts of forms, they were called typewriters.

As great as they were (not)--they did have a few problems. The problem that affects this long held typing myth is that each letter from a typewriter had the same width, and so did the spaces. This had two effects. First, if you were typing a page worth of solid text, (did I mention typewriters don't do images) typewriters had a nasty habit of lining up spaces on the page, which would then gang up on your page and create what were called "rivers" of spaces. Secondly, (and I have no clue about this because like every good student, I typed two spaces) it was very difficult for readers to separate sentences unless the typist used two spaces after every period.

Long story short, computers today do not have that problem because they can generate characters differently depending on their context, settings, etc. Rest assured that a single space will be sufficient in almost any computerized situation. If your actually looking at the text side-by-side, it almost looks like the double-spaces are gapped teeth.

Well this is all very new...

Once, long, long ago I had a blog... when I was in high school in 1998 or so. Well, now I might have some stuff to finally put on this blog and I hope that somebody can find the information useful. Of course, it will probably take me a week to start putting anything up that is worthwhile, but I don't think I'll be getting any hits until then so please ignore my warning.

The first topic I will probably get into is Business Requirement Documents and Software Requirement Specifications becuase that happens to be what I am wrtiting at work right now. However, I am getting one of those sexy new Apple keyboars today and possibly a 4" by 5" graphire tablet today--so it is always possible that I will have a review of one of those...