Tactics for being faster than a speeding bullet

In my last post, I described a situation in which one technical writer (yours truly) delivered a huge volume of customer information every four months and made it look easy. What did it take to be a superhero?

• Audience analysis
• Information design
• Project management
• Review management
• Time management
• Quality checks

Let’s talk about the first two tactical considerations – audience analysis and design.

Who are your customers?
What do they need to know?
What do they already know?
Do they know more than you do?
How can you make them happier with your organization than they are now?
Who are your competitors and what can you learn from them?
You can’t make rational choices about how to select, organize, and present information unless you know who will receive it and how they will use it. This is bedrock basic technical writing theory, and some writers still ignore it. Don’t. If you skip the audience analysis, you’ll do extra work and you won’t have time to outrun that speeding bullet. You’ll also fail to deliver what your customers need. They’ll call technical support to ask questions that start with “How do I…?” If you let that happen, the aforementioned speeding bullet will come from the help desk.

Information design flows naturally from knowing your audiences and understanding what they need. If you write about a product that people use in different ways depending on their roles, you know to segment the information based on roles. The person checking their own work into and out of a repository doesn’t need to know how to do database administration. Chronology may also provide a good criterion for sorting information: for hardware, you’ll often need an installation guide. Anything that happens after it’s installed can be documented somewhere else. How do you decide where? Try an outline. It’s old-fashioned but it works. Start by throwing everything you can think of into one outline; you can decide later how finely you need to slice and dice it up into manuals, tip sheets, tutorials, and whatnot.

When you start with an outline, things are packaged into tidy little headings. It’s orderly, with clear boundaries, almost like a coloring book. Why not keep it that way? Think and write in topics rather than sections. What’s the difference? Sections can ramble and sprawl sometimes, because they may start with one topic and digress to another. A topic is everything you need to know in one context about one thing – for example, how to change your password. It stays focused, and you only write it once. When it’s time to update the information, you can quickly identify which topics are affected, and leave the rest alone. When you don’t have to go through every word, updates are a lot faster – maybe even faster than a speeding bullet.