Listen! Do you want to know a secret?

Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read, you begin with A-B-C

• A is for Adobe.  The company that left Anindita with the distinct impression that it thinks that that the techcomm world revolves around it. Also see F and R.
• B is for Beta.  It stands neither for the second letter in the Greek alphabet nor the second brightest star in a constellation. It stands for not-yet-ready releases and is an excellent medium for techcommers to get feedback on their work.
• C is for content. That which makes the techcomm world go round.
• D is for DITA.  That thing which cures all ills.  Sane voices suggest otherwise but people still see through the glass darkly.
• E is for English.  A language much maligned by a tiny, pint-sized apostrophe, which, if misaligned, can even become a comma. E is for editors. That group of people who are haplessly left with correcting the thats and whichs when what they’d dearly like to do is spend time on indexes, navigation, and coherence and cohesion.
• F is for FrameMaker (See A). F is for feedback. A message where the message is often confused with the messenger, often unjustly.
• G is for Google.  It is a help authoring tool that saves a lot of SME time (see S).
• H is for Help. A verb and a noun (See the possibility related V). Help is a privilege. You may want it but not get it.
• I is for information. Information is a noun that cannot stand on its own; it must always be used as an adjective. Information design, information architecture, information developer, and information overload, for instance.
• J is for coffee and pictures. As in, Java and JPEG.
• K is for knowledge.  Of, besides writing, the tools, domains, and processes.
• L is for listening.  It stands for the characteristic of being alert and ready to hear anything that might lead to knowledge (see K).
• M is for multimedia, an umbrella term for anything that moves, creates noise, and can be packaged.
• N is for No. As in, “No, I will not document how it should work; only, how it does indeed work”, “No, I will not put this screenshot here because …”, “No, this will not go into an install guide because….”
• O is for obfuscation.  So long as obfuscation exists, so will a technical communicator.  If you do not know what obfuscation is, here is an example: “The relationship, which I might tentatively venture to aver has not been without a degree of reciprocal utility and even perhaps occasional gratification, is approaching the point of irreversible bifurcation and, to put it briefly, is in the propinquity of its ultimate regrettable termination.”
• P is for PDF.  It was born in 1993. Other births that year include Microsoft Windows NT and the republics of Slovakia and Czech.
• Q is for  curiosity. Why should I…? How does this…? When will it…? If I do this, what will….? What’s the difference between…? What is the weight of the moon?
• R is for RoboHelp (See A). R is for respect. An emotion that causes much existential angst among techcommers.
• S is for scrum. It means giving daily updates to your team and then running back to do the work you yourself promised to. S is for SME.  It means the fount of knowledge from which information must be gleaned. S is for substance (See C). S is for style. It is something best only followed, not tampered with.
• T is for Twitter.  A medium used almost exclusively to pimp blog posts, product launches, and rave reviews. T is for TWIN. Bonded for life.
• U is a letter so important that it must never be used in isolation. U is royalty and must always be teamed with other letters, like this: UX, UA. U is the reason techcommers exist; U is for users.
• V is for vision. That which makes techcommers put descriptions in alt text, pick the reds and greens with care, and prefer lists to tables. The ability to see beyond the obvious, to ‘write’ for everyone.
• W is for wiki.  Everybody knows it’s there but nobody knows what to do with it, hoping that somebody comes up with a wiki-to-source roundtripping that helps anybody adopt a wiki.
• X is a placeholder. As in XML.
• Y.  A letter for which I could not come up with a word. I did try to match it to words such as Yes, Year, Yearn, and Yesterday but felt something was missing.  So, I am leaving Y alone. For You, the reader.
• Z is for zen.  And the art of writing for motorcycle mechanics.

When you know the notes to sing
You can sing most anything

====================================================

This first appeared in the Nov-Dec2010 issue of INDUS, STC-India's newsletter.

Acknowledgements

• Rachna Singh Ganguli for G = Google, F = feedback, Help is a privilege, J=Java and JPEG, R = respect; T=TWIN.
• Anagha Bhat-Chandratrey for K = knowledge, L = learning.
• The Beatles, for “Listen! Do you want to know a secret”.
• The people of The Sound of Music (1965) for “Let’s start…with A-B-C” and “When you know…most anything”.
• The people of Yes, Minister (BBC) for “The relationship…termination”.

Woo hoo! Smart search is possible

Watson had not been on my mind when I wrote my last blog post. In fact, if you were to shake me awake in the middle of the night and say, "Watson!", my immediate response would have been "Elementary, Holmes!" Despite being vaguely aware of a project called Watson underway in my company, the name didn't really mean "Wow" to me till, well, last night.  But before I tell you why, let me go back a bit - and talk about my last blog post. In that post, I had implied 'storage' and 'retrieval' are two different things and, while tagging and indexing might work when one is storing something, the same tag or index could fail while retrieving the data. In my post, I had put foward a question - should content be context insensitive for it to be reused effectively? Conventional wisdom - that which runs search engines and SEO jobs - says, "No".

And then came along Watson, and beat two people in Jeopardy to win an indecent amount of money, which, it was declared, would be given to charity.  A computer beat two awesome humans.

Somewhere halfway through this video, when analysing why Watson got 'Chicago' wrong, you'll see the IBM engineer say something like "the info was stored in sectors but this was not about discrete compartments" or something to that effect.

Exactly! Human brain does not process information in linear paths. It hops, skips, jumps, runs around in circles. And, because we're getting there - with Watson's help - I think in my lifetime at least I'll see content being reused in ways that I (the writer) never imagined it could be because the user (with help from Watson) is retrieving just that much - and only that much - information that the user needs. Correctly, every time, the first time.  Smart user!

Lose that tag please

It all started last night when I tweeted some Hindi film dialogues (In India, we have two major religions - films and cricket).

(to zoom, click the image)

And then, we got around to discussing the bestest comedy film that's ever come out of Bombay. And, this was the tweet that got me to writing this blog post.

(to zoom, click the image)

How is this relevant to techwriting?

Well, if I were an indexer, I'd have probably tagged all my film content with some of these words: bombay, bollywood, hindifilm, <nameOFfilm>, <nameOFstar>, and so on? Very search friendly and all. But say, my reader was a sociologist researching corruption in India (ahem!).  This dialogue ("Thoda khao, thoda phenko" #epic) would never even show up in the search results, yet it contains exactly what the sociologist is looking for - the entire social mileu from which the phenomenon has sprung (including the defence mechanisms people employ to forget the misery it produces).

So, how did I link this dialogue to scams (that are occupying the entire front page - and more - of newspapers these past weeks)? Because in my mind, my content database is neither indexed nor tagged. I can pull out random references and tag it to anything random and yet make it look relevant.

Me: To copy, perchance to paste; Aye, there's the rub for in that paste what copies might come when we have shuffled the platforms and the versions out of the filters.
Colleague: Coils. Not filters. Coils.
Me: Coils.
<silence for one minute>

Colleague: A coil is a wrapper, right?
Me: Right.
Colleague: So, if we put a wrapper to call the boolean....

So, here I am, thinking if there is more to indexing that meets the eye. More to content reuse? More to "context"? Thoughts?