Cooking up good technical communication

I got home this evening with no idea what I’d have for dinner. I looked in the refrigerator, and didn’t see a lot to encourage me. I opened and threw away a lot of furry things, and ended up with

• an onion
• some cherry tomatoes
• the heel end of a roast
• a rather dispirited bell pepper
• a small potato

With about three more ingredients, I’d be able to…

…Beat my head against the wall, because I’d still be facing the problem of “What the heck am I going to make out of THIS?”

Frame the problem another way: What cuisines start with onions and tomatoes? Mexican, Italian, and Indian came to mind. Now add some bell pepper, potato, and meat – to me, this suggests a curry. Add some ginger, cumin, turmeric, and hot pepper. Set it to simmer.

An hour later, it’s delicious.

Technical communication works that way, too. Sometimes you start a new job looking at a collection of ingredients that don’t seem like enough to get the job done – an authoring tool, an intranet used by a few people, a pile of bloated manuals, a kind and earnest subject-matter expert who tells you it has to be done this way because it’s always been done this way. 

With about three more ingredients, you’d be able to…

…Beat your head on the wall, because you’d still be facing the problem of “What the heck am I going to make out of THIS?”

You can see what the last person made, but you need to know whether it was a satisfying dish. What has the process been? Where are the pain points? What are the private frustrations of each stakeholder? What have the customers been saying? The answers will give you an idea of what to cook up with the ingredients on hand.

Season it generously with the things you know will help: An assessment of the library that you’ve inherited, and (if necessary) a redesigned information architecture. Some basic project-management tools, such as a project plan and a project tracking tool. A special category in the bug-tracking tool to let people report deficiencies in the things you publish. 

Let things cook for a while. Let your stakeholders have a taste whenever they ask. Pay careful attention to their feedback; let them see that you want to serve up something to their taste. But remember that you’re the cook.

Stumbling, falling, getting back up

The Tribal Knowledge project.
Oh yeah.

Late last year I was given the charge to manage a project to document troubleshooting processes that exist only in the minds of a handful of tech support gurus. It will help the support group to train new support people more effectively, and it will take the pressure off the gurus, who currently spend a lot of time solving the same problems over and over.

We put the project aside at the start of the year, because things were getting busy. After the really busy period, we met in February and agreed to cut down the scope of the pilot phase. People were still too busy to meet regularly to create the half-dozen flowcharts we envisioned as the pilot phase of the project; a lot had been postponed during the big thrash in January. We would do just three flowcharts. We met again a couple weeks later and cut the pilot phase to the smallest possible effort: a single troubleshooting flowchart, to be shared and evaluated, tweaked and published on the BlobCo collaboration site. I could almost hear an imaginary sportscaster exclaim, "Oh, that was a nasty stumble - let's see if they can recover."

A very skilled tech support person volunteered to build the flowchart, and emailed it out for comments a few days later. Someone provided constructive technical review comments. The flowchart owner got very busy and didn't have time to make the changes. I urged her to post it in its unfinished form and let others collaborate on completing it.

Nothing happened.
Imaginary sportscaster: "And we've got a player down on the field - it looked like she was going to recover from that stumble, but she's down."
What went wrong?

The concepts of working laterally, collaborating, and doing stuff because it's the next step in the plan instead of because the boss said "Do it" are central to this project. They're also markers of a mind-set that was once strongly discouraged at BlobCo. I could see from early on that the organization was recovering from a nasty bout of 1980s-style command-and-control, but I didn't realize how deeply it had scarred people. Everybody is too busy with their regular work to participate in this subversive, risky project, because "too busy" is the perfect reason — it's true, and it shows that people's priorities are right: We can't do this strictly internal project because we've got customers who need our help.
Because it takes us a long time to help each customer.
Because we've never documented and shared our troubleshooting knowledge, so we have to go ask somebody instead of looking up a troubleshooting flowchart in some central place.

We are like lumberjacks too busy cutting down trees to stop and sharpen our axes.

I asked the VP sponsoring the project to help me figure out how to get it back on track. He proposed a way: Authority would be exercised. People would be given assignments. There would be rewards at the end.
This didn't feel right.

Six of the couple dozen participants showed up at the next meeting. Several people had mysteriously taken the day off. I was frustrated. But the passive resistance and my frustration both validated my sense that we were taking the wrong approach. My sponsor bowed out and told me I needed to enlist a new project sponsor, suggesting two people who were well-placed to do this.

Time to seek out a Jedi master. I talked to Cat Herder.

"You've got too many people on this project. You need to drop the ones who aren't passionate about it," said Cat Herder, who went on to give advice that resonated strongly with my original sense that the project can only succeed if people WANT to participate. In just a few minutes, I heard several ideas about how to foster the creative, collaborative environment that will set people up for success; and we roughed out a plan for reshaping the Tribal Knowledge project and getting it moving again.
I am listening.

You have to fall down before you understand what it means to get up, and it helps if someone offers you a steadying hand.

I may have just connected with the next great teacher in my life.

Over the Threat-Level Rainbow

September 11, 2001 didn’t change everything, but it changed a lot. We got a big new federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security; and one of the first things it gave us (aside from qualms about a name that evoked rhetoric about “das Vaterland”) was a system of communicating “the threat level” using the rainbow.

Before I say anything more, a word to the communication professional who was given the job to develop a system for telling us about the terrorist threat level in a clear way:
I am certain that what you came up with was great to start with, and that people way up your chain of command - people with communication skills on a par with those of compost heaps - told you to say it their way. We'll never get to see how you rose to the challenge so masterfully, but we know what it's like to be edited by a committee of people who couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag with properly sharpened pencils. This post is not about you, it's about them. You can show them this post if you think it will help.

The threat-level rainbow instantly became joke material.
Why?

There were a lot of reasons, and all of them provide lessons for technical communicators. To recap, here ‘s a link to a page with a graphical explanation of the system. This is on the Department of Homeland Security web site:
http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/Copy_of_press_release_0046.shtm

Here's the text in the graphic:

• (Red section) SEVERE: Severe risk of terrorist attack
• (Orange section) HIGH: High risk of terrorist attack
• (Yellow section) ELEVATED: Significant risk of terrorist attack
• (Blue section) GUARDED: General risk of terrorist attack
• (Green section) LOW: Low risk of terrorist attack

I think this graphic probably sent 90% of technical communicators up in a tight spiral. We had a lot of fun trying to top each other in pointing out what was wrong with it, because that’s what we do. But now that the DHS has decided to retire the threat-level rainbow, let’s see what lessons we can take from it and apply to our own work.

What should we do better?

Accessibility.
The colors were only meaningful to people with full-color vision. Although around 90% of the sighted population has full-color vision, using colors as the main keywords excluded TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans.
Do it better: Color is great, but if your audience might include people who can’t perceive it accurately, don’t use it as the main way to make your point.

Expectations.
As kids, we learn that the color sequence in the rainbow is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. When we see red – orange – yellow, we expect the next color to be green. The threat-level rainbow breaks our mental model: After yellow comes blue. So lots of people had trouble remembering what blue meant.
Do it better: Choose metaphors and symbols that are intuitively clear.

Metaphors that work.
The reason the threat-level rainbow goofs up green and blue is almost certainly that green means everything is OK, and that definition is not open to renegotiation. Rather than stopping and finding a visual metaphor that provided a meaningful sequence of five elements, they broke the metaphor after the third of five messages.
Do it better: Broken metaphors don’t help your audience. If your metaphor breaks at any point, find one that works better.

Intuitive scale.
Most people would recognize hot – warm – tepid – cool – cold as a five-point scale; but the keywords severe, high, elevated, guarded, and low don't form an obvious sequence. Low isn’t the opposite of severe, high isn’t the opposite of guarded.
Do it better: Don’t invent a scale; find one that expresses the continuum you’re talking about.

Appropriate scale.
The confusion about what the blue and green levels meant was moot, because the USA has never been at either level.
Do it better: This is akin to explaining “DANGER” notices in a manual that doesn’t have any. Don’t. Who has time to do work that won’t be used?

Tight editing.
Take another look at the list of threat levels. Why say “HIGH: High risk of terrorist attack” when you could say “HIGH risk of terrorist attack” instead? And what about “GUARDED: General risk of terrorist attack” – what does that even mean?
Do it better: Phrase things consistently, use as few words as you can get away with, and make each word convey your meaning precisely.

Warnings we can respond to.
Any time you’re at an airport in the USA, sooner or later you’ll hear an announcement that says the threat level is orange. George Orwell and Robert Anton Wilson would be proud: It’s an announcement calculated to make us tense up inside, but there’s never any advice about how to identify, evaluate, respond to, or prevent threats.
Do it better: If you’re going to warn people about a hazard, tell them how to stay safe.

We could delve into the implications of setting up a multi-level system to inform us of threats and then leaving the threat level unchanged for five years, but that’s outside the realm of technical communication.

Seven Habits of Highly Defective Technical Writers

If you want to be a Highly Defective Technical Writer, you need to learn industry worst practices. Here are seven to get you started.

1. People who read help are stupid. People who write help are smart. Don't ever forget that, and don't ever let your readers forget it.
   
   
2. Complexity of grammatical construction correlates in a positive manner with the perception of intelligence; thus it is advisable under all circumstances to endeavor to utilize sentence structures and locutions commensurate with the level of one's own education.
   
   
3. It is considered presumptuous to address readers as if they were present. Passive voice is preferred.
   
   
4. When documenting software that allows you to create, change, or delete something - your contact information, for example - write a separate topic for each task. It's far too confusing to provide instructions for more than one task in a single topic, or to write steps that involve choices (such as "If you need to add a new telephone number, click Add Number. If you need to change a number, edit it in the text box"). Remember, your readers are stupid.
   
   
5. Take every opportunity to continue selling your product. Remind users how attractive it is, how sleek its design and stylish its colors. Remind them how intuitive and easy it is to use.
   
   
6. People open the help when they are scared of making a mistake. When presenting a task, point out how easy it is. When you get to the step where people tend to go wrong, tell them it's really simple. People like to be reassured that they are smart enough to get it right. Remember, they're stupid.
   
   
7. Don't bother with teh spelling checker. It's for careless people who either can't type very well or are too ingorant to spell well. Your smarter than that.

When you've mastered these worst practices, you'll be well on the way to being a Highly Defective Technical Writer.

To blog or not to blog

A colleague remarked on Twitter that he's thought about blogging, but didn't feel that he had anything of value to say. I started thinking about why I follow him on Twitter: Because he's the sort of person I'd want to hang out with if we lived near each other - insightful, funny, and obviously passionate about his work. His tweets are always worth reading. I can learn from him, be inspired by him, and enjoy his wit.

And this man doesn't think he has anything to offer on a blog, so he hasn't been blogging.

One of the other threads that day was to do with the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which for years I'd been calling "meta-cluelessness" - the idea that some people lack the information or skill to discern that they lack information or skill.

My colleague seemed to be exhibiting the flip side of this effect: Highly capable people tend to underestimate their own skills and knowledge quite consistently, assuming that everyone knows at least as much as they do. If you've been doing a thing for a long time, and have quietly become an expert at it, you may take for granted what you know about it. You may assume that, since you've managed to learn how to knit socks, or rebuild engines, or write help that keeps customers from making tech support calls unless something actually breaks, surely everybody else in the entire world must know how by now.

But you're wrong. Lots of people don't know what you know. If you talk or write about it, some of those people will pay attention. Some of them will find your style engaging, and will want to learn from you. You'll enjoy getting to know some of them through their comments. You'll learn from some of them.

What are you waiting for? Your fans are looking for you. Start writing!

How to develop X-ray vision

Standard prerequisites for superheroes include being faster than a speeding bullet, being able to leap over tall buildings at a single bound, and being more powerful than a speeding locomotive. We’ve talked about how technical writers can meet all those qualifications. But real superheroes have X-ray vision, too.

Have you ever looked at a web site, picked up a brochure, or read a manual – and spotted a really dumb mistake? Quick show of hands - who hasn’t? I didn’t expect to see any hands up, and you didn’t disappoint me. Wouldn't you like to hang this AWARD OF EXCELLANCE in the entryway to your business?

After you look at the material long enough, you lose the ability to see your own mistakes. We know this. Quality checks help us see things we would miss otherwise, so that we never publish material that embarrasses the organization.

Things to check include:

• Formatting – if you control the formatting in the final deliverable, include separate checks for every aspect of this: font usage, text size and spacing, placement of graphics, headers and footers in print-oriented material…you can probably come up with a full page of format checks.
• Spelling, grammar, and punctuation – did you run a spelling check? Has someone read it through for grammar and punctuation? We are better at grammar checking than automated grammar checkers are, especially if the material is specialized technical information.
• Table of contents – is it complete and accurate? Was it generated after everything else was done?
• Index or search – you have this, don’t you?
• Parallelism in headings – If one topic is called “Creating accounts”, don’t call the next one “How to delete accounts.” Again, we know this. But if you collaborate with others on a work, or if you start a new topic without reviewing other topic headings, it’s easy to end up with headings that don’t follow consistent grammatical structures.
• Consistent grammatical structure in the text – for example, “To [start a task], click [button or link name].” If your work gets translated, this cuts the cost.
• Conformance to your organization’s style guide – you have one, don’t you? If not, start one right now. Start with an item about using consistent grammatical structures.
• Conformance to your organization’s identity standards – check for proper use and placement of the logo, correct color formulations, and whatnot.
• Links and email addresses – don’t trust them; test them.
• Conformance to file naming conventions – you have those, don’t you? Consistent file naming helps you find things later on, particularly if you use a version control system. Make file naming a part of your quality checklist so you can enforce it.

If you check your work against your quality checklist before you publish it, you’ll have the X-ray vision to catch things nobody else has spotted in earlier checks, and you’ll always publish material that shows your organization in its best light.


A tip of the hat to Thomas Moore of StorSpeed, who shared his checklist with me ten years ago. The man’s had X-ray vision as long as I’ve known him.

Tactics for being more powerful than a speeding locomotive

We’ve been talking about how to be a technical writing superhero – get the right information to the right people in the right way; be able to show your management that your project is on track. But if you’ve ever waited for a train that was late, you know that on track isn’t the same as on time.

Time management means being able to say no. Whenever someone comes running to you saying “I need your help,” it’s automatically an emergency. You’re a team player, so you may say “Sure, I can help you with that” without thinking.
Stop.
Think.
That emergency has the momentum of a speeding locomotive, and it will derail you if you’re not strong enough to stand against it. Is it really is more important and urgent than your project? Are you really the only one who can do it? Estimate what it will do to your schedule. If you aren’t completely in charge of your assignment list, ask your manager to make the decision. You don’t take the blame for schedule changes when your boss is in charge of signaling and switching the tracks. If you work on the emergency project, notify the rest of the project team – don’t wait for your boss to do it.

Speaking of locomotives, training can also derail you. My own time management epiphany came when I went to the office to put in a few hours after a full-day seminar at a nearby hotel. Then it hit me: “I just piddled away an entire DAY on a time management seminar that my boss sent me to, and my deadline’s Friday.” I think I bent the needle on my irony-meter. My boss (evil man!) smiled knowingly when I confronted him the next day and asked him never again to schedule me for training near a deadline.

Less obvious but more common is the failure to prioritize tasks. How many times have you worked on a diagram, tweaking and tuning and rearranging until you realize you’ve spent half a day on a picture that only reinforces existing text? Was that critical to the project? Hardly.

Remember the project spreadsheet I described in the last post? It prevents train wrecks. With two more columns, it becomes the train schedule. On your master list of information changes, add a column for prioritizing each item and a column showing anything that blocks you from getting it done. (Yes, it’s getting to be a great big spreadsheet with lots of columns. Hide the ones you’re not using at any given time.) Now you’ve got a system. Whatever you’re working on, you should be done with all the higher-priority items except those on which you’re blocked.

To review: your spreadsheet includes a master list of changes, with separate tabs to show the changes to each of your deliverables. Columns on these tabs are:

• Information change
• Work required
• Priority
• Blockers
• Subject matter expert
• Questions
• Date completed
• Date sent to review
• Date corrections received

With your spreadsheet superpowers, you’ll be able to stand firm against other people’s speeding locomotives and avoid derailing yourself.

Tactics for leaping over tall buildings

We've talked about how you, the superhero technical writer, can be faster than a speeding bullet through effective audience analysis and information design. “Sure you’re faster than a speeding bullet,” says the boss, “but what else can you do?” It’s time to leap over a tall building or two.

Leaping over tall buildings would be easier if we had a Shrink-o-Matic ray that scaled the buildings down to the size of things made with Lego® blocks. So let's build one, and let your boss keep thinking of you as a superhero. Key components of the Shrink-o-Matic ray gun: Project management and technical review management.

How do you keep track of project requirements? How do you stay informed of all the new features under development? How do you determine what parts of the documentation are affected by each change or new feature? How do you ensure the material is updated?

Start with a project plan that shows the reason for the project (such as a new software release), the schedule, your subject-matter experts and other project stakeholders, your deliverables and the scope of changes to them, your assumptions, and possible risks. Distribute this to all the project stakeholders. Publish it on your intranet. Update it weekly.

When your first draft of the project plan is done, start building your project tracking spreadsheet. Include each new or modified product feature on its own row. Identify which subject-matter expert owns each feature and which of your deliverables will cover it.

Create additional tabs in the spreadsheet file, one for each of your deliverables. For each one, pop in the topic outline that you created in the design phase – one row per topic. Start with these columns:

• Topic - this is the first or second column, depending on whether you want to show the topics by chapter or help book.
• Work required – specifies whether the topic is to be created, updated, or left alone.
• Subject-matter expert – who owns this information?
• Questions – anything you need the subject-matter expert to answer; any unresolved issues.
• Blockers – anything outside of your control that's keeping you from finishing the topic.
  
• Updated – check off each topic as you finish it.

As the project moves along, you can use the Questions column to create lists of questions for each subject-matter expert, so you can schedule short appointments with each of them to get the information you need.

When you encounter a blocker, bring it up in the next project meeting if it's not a well-known situation already - and mention it even if it is well-known. For example, "I still have a couple topics on feature X, which hasn't been coded yet, so I'm dealing with other features that are further along."

Now here’s the power-booster for your Shrink-o-Matic ray. For each deliverable, add two more tabs:

• To review - the date when you hand the topic to the subject-matter expert who owns it.
• Corrections received - the date that you get the topic back with corrections.

If you send out a whole manual to a whole team for review, they’ll hate you – and they won’t review it thoroughly. If you send topics out one at a time, as you complete them, and send each topic only to the developer who knows it best, you may get corrections back the same day. What’s more, there won’t be a big review backlog near the end of the project. Your organization may not be agile, but there’s no reason you can’t be. Working this way shrinks those tall buildings to something you can leap over, with your superhero cape billowing behind you quite convincingly.

A tip of the hat goes to John Hedtke, who introduced me to a stripped-down version of project management by spreadsheet several years ago.

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.

Faster than a speeding bullet

Two products that work together, customer information delivered on a CD as printable manuals and HTML help branded for the company and unbranded for its OEM partners, a four-month software development cycle, one technical writer.

One technical writer who does not pull late-nighters or work from home on weekends. One technical writer who meets deadlines and wins awards for the material.

How does that work?

Pretty well. Thanks for asking.
It’s all about strategy and tactics. The strategy is pretty simple: Do only the things that move you forward, but do whatever it takes to keep moving. The tactics are familiar, in principle at least, to most technical writers:

• Audience analysis – who are your customers? What do they need to know? How do they find out now, and how would they like to find out?
• Design from meta to micro – what are your largest units of documentation, and how do you decide what belongs in each one? What are your smallest units? How do you assemble the small units into the big units? How do you integrate new pieces of information? How do you make sure you'll never be caught flat-footed by a new requirement, such as translation?
• Project management – how do you keep track of all the project requirements? How do you ensure that you are aware of all the new features under development? How do you determine what parts of the documentation are affected by each change or new feature? How do you ensure all the material is updated?
• Time management – how do you make sure the important things get done and the project stays on schedule?
• Technical review management – how do you persuade your technical experts to give up some of their precious time to check your work? How do you ensure they’ll be willing to do it again?
• Quality checks – how do you make sure that you publish material that won’t embarrass the organization?

Tune in next week for some answers.

A glass half-full of new wine

A while back, I encountered a former business associate at a coffee shop and explained to her that I was embarking upon a career change. She told me I was overdue - on average, she said, people change careers every seven years.

Seven years - is that all? It's probably going to take me seven years to stop viewing the world through technical-writer-colored glasses. Navigating the intricacies of the red tape surrounding the training program I'm in, I've been documenting and reporting what it's taken to get things done. Looking through my new Cisco networking book today, my mental editor had her blue pencil out. Even so, I was a lot more mentally engaged with the idea of scoring a free motherboard. This tells me my mind-set is starting to move.

I'm still getting inquiries about my technical writing services from potential clients, some of whom seem intrigued at the idea of a technical writer with IT chops. For all I know, this may be less a career change than a specialization. But I'm excited about the possibility of doing something totally other than writing for a living.

The future looks frightening when you look forward and see only a wall; but when you look forward and see a multitude of paths, it's hard to be anything but optimistic.

I might get into tech writing

"Hey, how are you doing? What have you been up to, the last few months?"
"Oh, I'm doing all right. Looking for a job, though."
"Yes, I got laid off recently, too."
"You know, I was just thinking about getting into technical writing..."

This conversation bothers me every time I find it playing out - which it does so often I wonder if I'm in a time loop, like "Groundhog Day". The last time around, a few days ago, it was time to dig into the question of why it bothers me.

I know this is meant as an expression of interest in my trendy and lucrative profession. I know it is not meant a subtle variant on "Anybody can write."

Still, I can't picture myself saying to my friend, "You know, I've been thinking about getting into engineering," or "I've been thinking about getting into project management." I would sound presumptuous, at least to my own ears. I've been a technician and and engineering assistant, but I don't have the training to be an engineer. I took the coursework from the Project Management Institute, but did not sit for the PMP exam. If I were to consider becoming an engineer or a project manager, I would need to start by becoming qualified to do the work.

Within the Society for Technical Communication, the idea of certification for technical communicators resurfaces from time to time; to date I've opposed it because the Society hasn't ever worked out what that would entail. But now an effort is under way to develop a body of knowledge (BoK), which has been the missing piece. Once the Body of Knowledge is declared ready for use, I will have a helpful answer to my friends who speak of becoming technical writers. I'll be able to point at it and tell them, "Here is a good place for you to start."

The STC Body of Knowledge is in progress at http://stcbok.editme.com/ - take a look, or contribute.

The idea that wouldn't die

Some ideas sound great for about five seconds, and then gracefully go away. Some sound uninspiring at first, but gradually reveal their brilliance. And some ideas sound like Manhattan Projects for opening pickle-jars, but they just won't go away. Exhibit A in this category is the idea of certifications for technical writers.

Full disclosure first:
I do not meet the educational requirements so loved by personnel departments. I have never studied journalism or English, beyond the bare minimum. I do not have a bachelor's degree in anything. I have a trade-school degree in electronics. I became a technical writer more or less by accident. So I don't like the idea because it might mean my résumé and sheaf of awards might not be enough to get me in the door for interviews.

Let's step back, though, and think about this.

What problem are we trying to solve?
There's no arguing the fact that in every profession, there are people who just aren't any good at what they do; and it's hard to get rid of them once you've hired them. It would be easier if there were a way to avoid hiring them. There is; but it requires knowing something about the work. Organizations hiring their first technical writers don't have that expertise; but they need to get it right the first time. So there is a real business problem to be solved.

Many professions use certifications, some with more success than others. I respect people who are certified project management professionals. I know the effort it represents, and I know the range of skills upon which it focuses. I respect people who have been certified as professional engineers; again, I know that the letters "PE" after the name represent a great deal of work and a fair degree of skill.

I'm not nearly as comfortable with teacher certification, because I'm not persuaded that it's meaningful. I've dealt with far too many teachers who could be described at best as mediocre. Go ahead and flame me. In ninth grade I had a science teacher who could not do sums. (Hey, here in Texas we are all about equal opportunity.) Is it possible to create technical writing certifications that are more meaningful than teacher certifications?

To be useful, certification needs to do three things:

• Correctly identify the essential skills of the profession.
• Assign them appropriate importance relative to one another.
• Test them in a valid way.

The sheer diversity of work that comes under the heading of "technical writing" makes it difficult even to identify a core skill set. Is there a meaningful "common denominator" among all the skills represented in our profession?

I was once hired as a technical writer for a job that involved no writing at all. I was to add conditional text tagging to existing material in such a way that the team could produce manuals for new products without changing the text and conditions already in place for existing products. I have had technical writing jobs that included extended periods of creating pictorial instructions only. One might think that any technical writer should have an excellent command of grammar and punctuation; but would it have been meaningful to require proficiency in grammar and punctuation in these situations?

Should we even think of technical writing as a single profession?

Many have suggested specialized certifications to address this. But technology moves quickly, while certifying bodies move slowly. What's going to be the good of having a ten year old certificate in web design? The only solution I can see is to certify people's understanding of concepts rather than implementations. Don't certify people in web design; certify their understanding of usability, searchability, and accessibility. Don't certify people in writing manuals; certify them in organizing information and knowing when to show rather than tell.

That might actually work.