This popular handbook presents a step-by-step method for clearly explaining a product, system, or procedure. The easy-to-follow text--packed with examples and illustrations--explains the unique demands of this form of writing and shows how to set up the best user model. The book covers developing a modular outline and storyboard, generating the draft, revising, developing a formal usability test, and supporting and updating user documentation. Also included are a glossary of terms, a listing of books and periodicals for additional information, and an index.
Designed to help processing professionals and technical writers write clear, accurate computer user documentation. Presents a systematic approach to writing paper and online documentation. Version 2 retains much essential material from the first edition, while offering new information on desktop publishing, CASE tools and the ``software factory'' programming technologies. Also covers new techniques such as team writing, hypertext, mass storage and more.
Looking for a way to invigorate your technical writing team and grow that expertise to include developers, designers, and writers of all backgrounds? When you treat docs like code, you multiply everyone's efforts and streamline processes through collaboration, automation, and innovation. Second edition now available with updates and more information about version control for documents and continuous publishing.
"Best Collection of Essays", NCTE Awards for Excellence in Technical and Scientific Communication. Effective Documentation is a major sourcebook that offers technical writers, editors, teachers, and students of technical communication a wide variety of practical guidelines based on often hard to find research in the usability of printed and electronic media. The book's eighteen chapters provide a wealth of material on such topics of current interest as the writing of design manuals, research in cognitive psychology as applied to the design of user manuals, and the organizing of manuals for hierarchical software systems. Included are chapters by such well known scholars in the field as Philip Rubens, Robert Krull, Judith Ramey, and John Carroll. Effective Documentation reviews the advice offered by other "how to produce usable documentation" books, describing the different types of usability research and explaining the inherent biases of each type. It goes beyond the actual design of textual and/or electronic media to look at these designs in context, giving advice on effective management ("good management is a requisite of good writing"), on the relationship between document design and product design, and on how to find out who one's readers really are. Advances in the presentation of textual information are explained, with suggestions on how to improve the usability of individual sentences and the design of entire books. The concluding chapters discuss advances in the design and use of online information and offer valuable insights into the use of graphic information and the development and design of information communicated via electronic media. Stephen Doheny Farina is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Clarkson University. Effective Documentationis included in the Information Systems series, edited by Michael Lesk.
Providing details of the writing process - from preparation through to editing - this guide should be useful to anyone who has to organize or write user documentation. With an emphasis on computing and business this book provides information for all practitioners.
The Art of Technical Documentation presents concepts, techniques, and practices in order to produce effective technical documentation. The book provides the definition of technical documentation; qualities of a good technical documentation; career paths and documentation management styles; precepts of technical documentation; practices for gathering information, understanding what you have gathered, and methods for testing documentation; and considerations of information representation, to provide insights on how different representations affect reader perception of your documents. Technical writers and scientists will find the book a good reference material.
No other book can better prepare you to work as a writer in the technical world, to write better about technology for a nontechnical audience, or to understand how the ever-more-inportant writer can help fill the technology gap between the knows and know-nots. Book jacket.
