The collaboration between DoX Systems and those who teach technical communication in Finland continues. I have written about our collaboration with the University of Vaasa before. This Fall, such collaboration extended to the Master’s programme in technical communication at the University of Tampere.
University of Vaasa
My guest lectures at the University of Vaasa involved me sharing my experiences as a technical writer at DoX Systems and my perspective on the field as both a system provider and a support operative.
I discussed the skills and experiences that had been helpful to me when I changed careers. I also told the students about my own responsibilities in a small software company both in terms of technical writing and outside it.
For example, I have gleaned that a considerable number of technical writers are insomniacs. Luckily, many have access to flextime.
The feedback that I received tells me that students in this field are interested in the realities of working as a technical writer.
University of Tampere
I held two guest lectures at the University of Tampere. The subject of the first lecture was the same as at the University of Vaasa. The second lecture was focused on structured authoring and the best practices related to it.
The subject of the second lecture was specifically ‘the significance of foresight and preparations in structured authoring’. I primed the subject by introducing key concepts such as ‘tree structure’.
Afterwards, I discussed three of the main principles of structured authoring which make foresight and preparation important.
- Generativity: Users cannot directly control all the details. Producing documents in part relies on automated systems such as the compilers for different formats.
- Single-sourcing: Properly prepared environments let you reuse the same pieces of content and make changes to each involved position with a single source version.
- Conditioning: You can mark content to only be used in matching publications. This makes the shared parts single-sourced between such publications.
The next portion involved accounting for these three principles when you prepare content and preparing content in a way that implements them. For example, the contents of topics must be organized in a way which accounts for both style sheets and the limitations of compilers. I have previously written on the subject here.
The general message of the lecture was that proper structured authoring requires both foresight and preparation to achieve the best results and user experience. Users must understand how different types of content and systems interact for them to use them correctly. They must understand details such as affording later expansions and recognize which variables and such will obviously be required before they write the main content. This way, the main content need only be written once to account for later additions and without needing to stop to instead add components such as variables to the system.