What does single sourced content mean to readers?

Lyn Gattis kindly sent us a copy of her PhD dissertation over the Christmas break. She used some content from the Cherryleaf Web site in her dissertation, which looked into the comprehensibility of single sourced technical documents.

In her dissertation, Lyn painted this scene:

"Judi Greene is evaluating the capabilities of 'CommonText', a new single sourcing application. She recognizes single sourcing's potential for greater efficiency in a rapidly changing publishing environment, but questions whether single sourcing truly serves readers well."

This imaginary Documentation Manager's concerns are:

• How well can single sourcing methods accommodate rhetorical variations that would improve reader comprehension?


• Is highly standardized text appropriate for cross-cultural audiences?


• Does removing meta language, particularly cohesive devices, from single sourced texts significantly affect comprehension for specific groups of readers?

The key result from Dr. Gattis's study indicates that readers are more likely to comprehend texts with lexical repetition (which are often sacrificed in single sourced documents and online Help files). When texts are cohesive, readers are more likely to consider information to be clear, well organized and easy to follow.

Dr. Gattis's conclusions coincide with future trends we and others have hypothesized:

• Human editorial oversight will continue to be essential for comprehensibility, even when composing is partially automated.


• Technical Communicators may need to specialize on different tasks within the team.

In addition, she argues:

• Documentation teams will need to resist system efficiency as an overarching goal.


• Lexical repetition, cohesive devices and other textual features will need to be incorporated into specifications right from the start, i.e. during the document planning stage.


• Organizations have several options for integrating cohesive devices into single sourced texts. However, these options may reduce writer productivity.

One solution is to build cohesion into templates, boilerplate documents, style sheets, DTDs and/or schema.

Interestingly, this was the approach by RePublico software (now defunct), and are capabilities being introduced into AuthorIT and similar tools.

Can technical authors be "part of the conversation"?

I was reading a post by an acquaintance of mine, William Buist, on how advertising will need to change in the future.

He wrote:

"At a recent conference Mark Zuckerberg, the 23 year old boss of Facebook was talking to 250 or so “middle aged” advertising executives about the news ways that Facebook envisaged advertising developing. His thoughts are indeed interesting. “For the last 100 years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation”. That phrase - 'Part of the conversation’ caught my eye. What does it mean to you?"

Surely technical communicators will face a similar challenge - to be part of "the conversation" in the connected Web 2.0 world that's emerging.

William posed some questions for advertisers that can be also posed to the technical authoring community:

- If we are going to be part of the conversation, will we be let in?
- What would make people do that?
- Once we are in the conversation how can we best add value to that conversation?

Other questions arise:

- Will engaging with a community in a social networking environment create a new and better way of providing user assistance?
- Will social networks create an opportunity for technical communicators to eavesdrop a conversation as well as take part of it?
- Will the rise of streaming websites both for audio and video such as YouTube enable technical communicators to be more viral in their efforts to provide effective user assistance?
- Will technical communicators see snippets of their technical information embedded in other people's Web pages?
- Might the lines between technical support and technical authors start to cross over?

Where do this all go?

William concludes:

"The advertisers who get this right, who deliver to us the right products or service at the right price at the time we need will clean up. The ones who get it wrong could considerably destroy the brands behind the advertising. One thing is certain, the face of advertising is changing. The need for more contextual advertising is clear and the willingness of brands and businesses to engage at the conversation in a social networking environment is becoming more paramount."

If you substitute "technical communicators" for "advertiser", then we could probably say the same thing.

Asterpix interactive video example

Making interactive "How To" videos

Hypertext functionality comes to videos.

Asterpix is an interesting Web site that enables technical communicators and trainers to create interactive videos.

This brings Captivate-type functionality to TV/YouTube videos.

You can add hotspots and hyperlinks to areas of the video, allowing viewers to get more information on objects of interest during video playback.

Viewers can also navigate directly to specific scenes that contain objects of interest without having to watch the entire video.

This may address some of the disadvantages with video based instruction: having to sit through the whole video; no interactivity; poor search and skip; and no drill down, "minimal manual" capabilities.

(Thanks to Laura Jaffrey).