Engineers as authors
ant at ant-davey.com
ant at ant-davey.com
Mon Oct 7 13:01:53 PDT 2013
Working with railway engineers in the UK, I'd have to agree with Matt.
Your biggest challenge is going to get the engineers to adopt brevity,
or minimalism as we sometimes call it.
You will need to define a level of assumed knowledge in your
audiences, and then determine the questions that need answers. The
herding cats bit will come when you try to get the engineers to write
something that ONLY answers the question in front of them.
Yes, let them write in Word, but develop a template in which the
paragraph format names are exactly the same as those in Frame. Content
then imports by copy with little additional work needed. (You will
need to delete the Word markup for ordered and unordered lists. The
hard part here will be getting the engineers to use the paragraph
formats and not inline formatting.
Good luck,
Ant
> On 07 October 2013 at 16:25 Matt Sullivan <matt at mattrsullivan.com>
> wrote:
>
> Training engineers in tech comm tools is usually about as effective
> as training tech comms in the software tools the engineers use--that
> is, it's not generally effective.
>
> I recommend the engineers use whatever tool they're most
> comfortable with (Word) and you provide a template and train them in
> use of stylesheets and standards in that application.
>
> After the content is written, have your team import it into Fm.
>
> For changes, give the engineers a PDF and use Fm's commenting and
> revision tools to update content.
>
> FWIW, this it the way I handle docs for a major corporate airline
> and a large medical software company.
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> -Matt
>
> Matt R. Sullivan
> co-author Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 11
> <http://framemaker11book.com/>
> P: 714.798.7596 | C: 714.585.2335 | matt at mattrsullivan.com
> <x-msg://673/mailto:matt@mattrsullivan.com>
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> On Oct 7, 2013, at 7:26 AM, Stephen O'Brien <
> sobrien at innovmetric.com <x-msg://673/mailto:sobrien@innovmetric.com>
> > wrote:
>
>
> > > Hi,
> >
> > A few mechanical engineers have been asked, as part of their
> > varied workload, to author certain documents in English (How To,
> > Webinars, software essentials) in the near future.
> >
> > Working with authors who are not formally trained is a new
> > experience for me. I am wondering how to best define their tasks
> > and the tasks of my technical writing group who will work together
> > to ensure quality documents. For example:
> >
> > · I could provide the engineers with templates in
> > FrameMaker and an introduction to the basics of technical writing
> > and English grammar and bring them to write good documents over
> > time. Some formal training in technical writing could be offered.
> > The technical writers would then review the final documents
> > (container and content) to ensure the overall quality of the
> > documents.
> >
> > · Or, maybe the role of the engineers should be
> > to write rough content within guidelines (get the ideas and
> > workflows on paper), and my team of technical writers could be
> > responsible for formatting the content and expressing their
> > ideas/workflows correctly in English. This would take much less
> > time for the engineer (less of a learning curve).
> >
> > Do you have some experience in this matter? Any hints for
> > what may work best?
> >
> > Many thanks.
> >
> > Here in Quebec City, Canada autumn is in full color. Mother
> > Nature at her very best.
> >
> >
> > Stephen O'BRIEN
> > Coordonnateur à la documentation et rédacteur technique
> > senior | Documentation Coordinator and Senior Technical Writer
> > InnovMetric Logiciels | Software
> > sobrien at innovmetric.com
> > <x-msg://673/mailto:sobrien@innovmetric.com>
> > T (1) 418.688.2061
> > F (1) 418.688.3001
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