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.

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.