Campbell Chapter 5
Campbell Chapter 5 takes a look at various formats in use for technical writing. Learning to use the right formats for the righ information is crutial for an audience as information can easily become lost or boring when in a poorly chosen format. It would be ridiculous to have to sift through a formal narrative for a process that could easily be explained in a flow chart. At my workplace this seems to happen a lot, especially when it comes to availability. The department I work in has no standard for posting availability and many times people post it in a narrative format. These notes are often confusing, or a little hard to read. This could easily be remedied by creating a chart of some kind, rather than relying on a block of text to display the information.
posted by Ryan @ 12:02 PM
6 Comments:
This was an interesting chapter. I've seen a lot of policies and procedures but I don't ever remember seeing anything in the Playscript form. I may have to try writing something up like this and see how people like it. Most of what I see are Outlines and lists. I know our IT helpdesk lives and dies by flowcharts.
I am a HUGE believer of the flowchart. While there are some people that can handle all of the information without visually seeing it in a flowchart - it is better to be safe than sorry. Strictly putting things into words is okay for a rough draft, but not much more. To me, flowcharts are the best way to show "if this happens, then do this. but...if that doesn't happen, then do this." I'm not sure about the Playscript form...maybe for simple tasks but it might get confusing if there are too many possible end results.
So far Campbell has talked about what to put in policies and procedures and how to word them, now in this chapter she talks about the proper forms with which to arrange the information in documents. Like Campbell said, certain information just lends itself better to certain means of presentation - you’re not going to have critical emergency instructions written in prose; it needs to be obvious and to the point to best serve the particular audience. How the document is laid out can be just as important to the readers’ comprehension as the information it contains.
This chapter brought up yet another very important key to writing- proper format. I can think of a great example dealing with bad formatting. My old supervisor at work always did a really good job with formatting. She used memos and charts frequently to give us information. My new supervisor is another story. All the information he gives us is presented poorly and is usually really hard to figure out (he doesn’t explain anything, he just gives us the documents to read on our own time).
The format of a document can be just as important as the information it contains. Bulleted lists, flow charts, and tables are more concise ways of presenting information than writing it in a paper format. For instance, a new company would not want to write paragraph after paragraph about themselves, a list with all the highlighted parts would be much easier for customers to use.
I'm a pretty big advocate of the flowchart, and any illustrations that really reduce the amount of straight-up reading that has to be done. Being able to sift through a document and find what you're looking for is very important--I'd even go as far as to say it's more important than completeness of an intruction set.
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