Asking Questions is Key

I think one of the hardest things in technical writing, especially for new hires, is to be assigned to document a product or feature that you know nothing about. Since we have a wide variety of LabVIEW products, from signal processing to HMI to control and simulation to report generation to sound and vibration measurements (not to mention the core product itself), no one can be expected to understand the minutiae of them all. And yet our writer who works on a Control Design product might be asked to edit another writer who is working for an HMI product. Or the signal processing writer might leave and the HMI writer might be asked to fill in until we can find a replacement.

Whew. That's a lot of stuff to cover. But we're not engineers. Some of us have a technical/mathematical/scientific background, sure, but many of us are English or Tech Comm majors. How do you write help for a product you know nothing about?

Well the answer is: you learn. You do this primarily by working with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who, here, are the engineers who develop these products. They are the ones who have not only the domain expertise (like advanced degrees in the aforementioned disciplines), but also the LabVIEW programming knowledge to help you write documentation.

Still, it can be daunting to read a feature spec and not know where to begin. That's why I believe one of the most important skills a technical writer can have is knowing how to ask questions. (There's a reason we have several Journalism majors who work here.) Questions about functionality, background reasoning, implementation, usefulness, future features, and so on. Questions that nitpick and dig into what the developer really meant when he said "if necessary". These are all fair game in determining a starting point, an outline, for writing documentation. And once you have that outline, you're in far better shape than you were before, because you have a plan of attack. Even if you initially knew nothing about the feature.

Of course, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't ask questions if you don't know enough about the feature to know what questions to ask! That's why, on the LV Doc team, we've developed a list of questions to help writers, especially new ones, get started writing about unfamiliar features. That's why research with the developers can be so valuable. Even if you don't know what they're talking about, you can pick out patterns, keywords, and things to ask questions about later.

That's why we look for writers who are geeks, who love learning technical information. We don't ask you to be a computer scientist when you join NI. But if you're going to write for (as an example) LabVIEW, you'd better get a thrill out of learning about object-oriented programming, data types, and 3D graphs. Otherwise you're going to hate it here, which is a situation nobody wants :-)

Over time you develop patterns of behavior that proves successful in giving you a sufficient amount of information about a product in a short amount of time. And then when you're asked to pitch in on another product, you aren't afraid anymore. You trust yourself to be able to obtain the knowledge you need in order to do your job well.

Tech Writing = OCD?

Over at Ars today, Erica Sadun gives thanks for the iPhone SDK's documentation:

Thank you for the kick-ass SDK documentation. I know you have employed many OCD victims who would otherwise be wandering the street picking up litter and tidying our world and instead aimed them at creating precise and glorious help pages. Sure, it takes about five years to download each API update but oh, the beauty of it when it finally is installed!

I've often had a similar thought about my team. The LabVIEW Documentation team consists of some of the most detail-oriented people you will ever meet. We debate using "attend" vs. "participate in". We agonize over "both" vs. "either". We spend half an hour brainstorming the placement of a level 2 heading and worry over its effects on the help file table of contents. We nitpick over parallelism in bulleted lists, consistent descriptions of everything, and so many other things. We pester developers with questions, trying to nail down that one perfect way of describing a feature.

And the worst part about it is -- we like it :-) (Well, at least I do.)

I don't know if it qualifies as OCD, but I'm sure there's some sort of term for how we are. "Grammar Nazi" comes to mind, but that's really pejorative and, to me, relates to Web forums where you're correcting the grammar of strangers in a situation where that activity is not expected or encouraged. "Anal-retentive" could be another description, but again, that feels pejorative :-) "Detail-oriented" is good, I suppose. I would say that we just care a lot about presenting information in the most helpful, unambiguous way possible.

Ahh, see, I'm doing it again!

Apple Releases Sept 2008 Style Guide

Hat tip to Daring Fireball (an excellent blog that I read despite not owning any Apple products) for the news that Apple has released its 2008 style guide.

When 1,000 writers are writing technical documentation for 2,000 products, consistency is very important, even down to the correct capitalization and noun strings used to refer to specific parts of software or hardware. Style guides keep everyone on the same page, so to speak, and help reduce confusion among customers when they read about "front panel objects" versus "front panel controls" versus "front panel nodes". Are those the same thing or are they different things? You, as the customer, should not ever have to wonder about this. The style guide helps mitigate these issues.

Of course this means that, as a writer, your range of expression is restricted. You cannot write everything the way you want to. There is very little room for creativity and personal style. You must submit to the whims of the company style guide. Some people find this situation constricting and frustrating. So it's important that technical writers have a say in how their style guide is constructed. It must not be an authoritative top-down mandate from on high. It must not change every two weeks at the whims of a tyrannical editor who decides that it's okay to split infinitives in January but not in March.

No, the style guide must be collaboratively constructed and able to be modified by anybody. If you have 1,000 writers in the company, you can introduce some representation into the process to make things easier; that's fine. Form a style guide committee comprised of members from different groups. Regularly rotate through representatives. Non-reps can submit their own issues (as bug reports) to the committee and argue for them in front of the committee, who will decide. Yes it sounds very, well, Congressional. And it takes a lot longer than simply deciding things. But style guides shouldn't change too often anyway -- that's one way to confuse and frustrate people. And if you're going to enforce a process on somebody, at least give them a say in how that process is constructed. You don't have to agree with their suggestions, but you do need to give them an avenue for dissent. Otherwise, all the little frustrations will build up, and the only opportunity to release those frustrations will be to quit (or move into Marketing!).

After all, you hired smart people, right? So put their intelligence to use.

And by all means, encourage new hires to look at the style guide. They will find all those weird little issues and inconsistencies that you never noticed because you've been dealing with the same document for six years.

Finally, remember that there's a reason it's called a style guide and not a style rulebook. There will be situations in which it makes more sense to go against one of the guidelines rather than blindly following the style guide. Recognize these situations and learn to make your case for why, in this case, splitting an infinitive is okay. Remember that the number one decider of any situation is "will this help the customer understand what we're talking about?"

Note here that I'm talking about style guides for technical writers. But my ideas could just as easily apply to coding conventions or "best practices" documents for programmers.

Conference Calls Are Awesome

McLuhan famously said "The medium is the message." In my 10 months in Shanghai, I've been learning just how true that is. More than once now I've been involved in a disagreement or similar situation that has been instigated, and carried through, in email. These emails take a lot of time to write and respond to, because we all want to be precise. And because of the time difference, I don't receive emailed replies until the next day. And text-based communication removes a lot of the verbal cues you get when talking to someone.

Each time, after the emails have bounced around for a week or so, someone has suggested a conference call. These calls have cleared the air, clarified intentions, removed negative feelings, and gotten everybody on the same page and moving forward.

So as emails continue to fly between Shanghai and Austin, I've learned to listen to that first feeling of frustration in "We're not making any progress here" or "There's some incredible misunderstanding going on here". At the first hint of that, I suggest a conference call. Because of the 13- or 14-hour time difference between the branches, those calls can be painful. They involve someone staying late (or remote-desktopping into the office from home) and someone getting up early. But that's the reality of doing business in a global economy (and a global company). For me, it just means 1) an easier time catching a cab in Shanghai and 2) two cups of coffee in the morning instead of one ;-)

And the calls, as I've said, are worth it for the benefits they provide and the time they save. Emails are great for one-off questions, things that don't need a huge amount of explanation, or confirming something that everybody agrees with. But when you get into the nitty-gritty of brainstorming, resolving arguments, introducing unfamiliar concepts, or similar complexities, conference calls are invaluable.

We Use LabVIEW, Too

I'm really proud to say that I'm not only a LabVIEW technical writer -- I'm also a client! One great thing about being a technical writer at NI is the opportunity to actually USE the products we document. Okay, so I haven't gotten a chance to prototype a control system. But technical writers at NI use LabVIEW every day to improve our internal processes.

That's a pretty general statement, so I'll give you a specific example. One of the great features of LabVIEW is the Context Help system. The information you see, when you press and move the mouse over a block diagram object, is determined by three fields in the VI Properties dialog box: VI description (the actual text displayed below the connector pane image), Help path (the path to the .CHM file that contains the help topic), and Help tag (the HTML file name contained inside the .CHM file). When the last two fields are valid, the Context Help window displays a "Detailed Help" hyperlink below the VI description.

We have internally-developed tools to "populate" (import) the Context Help -- by which I mean, transfer the proper information from our source material into the VIs themselves -- before release, so all the information appears properly in the software. But (like all software) these tools aren't perfect, so we have more processes in place to verify a successful Context Help population before release.

Now, LabVIEW has a HUGE library of VIs, functions, structures, constants, and so on -- and almost every object has controls and indicators with even MORE context help. Not to mention dialog boxes, which contain even more information. I don't know exactly how many, but the core product has tons, and our add-ons add on (hah!) even more. This massive number makes it really challenging to manually verify the Context Help population before each release. And yet that's what we do -- spend a lot of time hovering over icons and clicking Detailed Help links, and filing bug reports when necessary.

Is this starting to sound familiar? I bet many of you reading this blog have procedures for manually testing your products. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to automate these tests? Funnily enough, I work for a company that develops products to do just that ...

So what I'm in the middle of doing now is developing an automated testing system, using LabVIEW, to verify the context help integrity of any given number of VIs. You give it a top-level palette (.mnu) file, and the VI I'm writing will recurse (yes, recurse!) through all the subpalettes, build a list of items on those palettes, and verify the Context Help for each item. 

No more hovering over palette items ad infinitum. No more manual testing. You just specify a .mnu file and away the program goes. And in fact, since the path to the .mnu file is not likely to change from day to day, you can run this VI programmatically by passing in the path as part of another process. And there you have it, a fully automated test. All you do is check the report when you come in each morning. "What errors do we have today?" And you can use this information to improve the tools that actually import the context help, because you discover all the little corner cases that you missed when developing those tools.

This is just one example of internal tools development. We've developed a whole suite of them, all using LabVIEW, to verify the integrity of our HTML help files, and use them every day. Just as the software itself might build automatically every night, so do our .CHM files. And just as software autotests might run every night while you sleep, so do our .CHM tests. 

I say we really put the "technical" in technical writing.

What We Do

One of the tech writers here at NI Shanghai has posted a great entry describing what she does all day. Now, we don't do all of this stuff every day. But a large majority of it will be done over the course of a week or so. At any rate, it's a great peek into just what life is like at the office -- because I know you all were curious about exactly that :-)

No English Spoken Here

I've never had the opportunity to learn a foreign language before, outside of the pidgin-Spanish I can remember from 7th-8th grade. Coming to Shanghai and attempting to learn Mandarin has been an adventure. A frustrating and difficult adventure, but a worthwhile and rewarding one also.

At the same time as I'm trying to learn a new language (or at least get some basic handle on it), I'm reviewing the documentation of newer writers here. After three years, NI and LabVIEW style, as well as general best practices for technical writing that we employ, are pretty much second nature to me. So it is refreshing to have to think about our style guides in terms of new writers: having to explain and document things that I have not thought about, at a detailed level, for at least a little while. I imagine it's a similar feeling to the feeling my Chinese colleagues have when I ask them questions about Mandarin -- at least, I hope it is :-)

This experience has taught me one other thing: we do not write English at NI. What we write is an ultra-specific and precise dialect that I haven't thought up a funny name for yet (but I'm working on it). This means that the English you practiced in college, on essays and exams and in emails to your professors, will not suffice. We have our own highly-specific ways of writing and editing documentation. Suddenly you're presented with new symbols, words, terms, and rules in which those objects can, cannot, and must be combined.

I experienced this over three years ago when I first started at NI. I like to think I had a decent command of grammar coming out of college -- but in terms of NInese, I was unaware of just how little I knew. No split infinitives? Where do I put the "only" in this sentence? I have to repeat this edit in how many places? Why is there colon here, but not there? You mean we can't we say "drop"?

Learning these new symbols and patterns of communication was, just like starting to learn a foreign language, very frustrating. And this is on top of the actual technologies I was expected to write about, which required their own set of learning curves. And of course there's the processes that surround our documentation - sending documents to review, using Perforce and LabVIEW, and so on. (Look what NI has done to me -- I almost never write 'etc.' anymore, even in non-work writing situations.) Of course there's a reason for (almost) every decision and item in the style guide and the practices we follow. But figuring these out was a steep learning curve. Starting to learn Chinese must have triggered these same reactions in my brain, because it is only now that I made the connection between learning a foreign language and starting fresh at NI.

To be fair, we're up front with all this. We tell job candidates and new employees that the learning curve is high and it will take quite awhile before they feel comfortable here. We don't expect anyone to grasp all our intricacies on the first day, or even in the first month. But I wonder if we should tell them that their English is only partially useful here -- to succeed, they will need to learn a new language.

Non-trivial Typos

From now on, I'm going to start filing typos as bug reports that are far more serious than "trivial".

Barry Bonds seized on a pair of typos, complaining in court papers Thursday that the government's mistakes could compromise his chances for a fair trial. The typographical errors showed up in a recent filing by prosecutors wrongly accusing Bonds of flunking a drug test in 2001. They later admitted they instead meant 2000.

Bonds now is seeking to dismiss his perjury case based solely on the existence of this typo. Just think about that the next time somebody files you a bug report to fix a typo :-)

Digital Reviewing

For the 3+ years I've been at NI, I have been reviewing documents by printing out hard copies and distributing them to reviewers. However, now that I am doing more reviewing than writing, I've fallen in love with the commenting features of Adobe Reader. The process works like this:

1. Create CHM or PDF files.
   
2. Print CHM file to a PDF file. We can do this because we have Acrobat installed.
3. Enable PDF for commenting in Adobe Reader, so developers who do not have Acrobat can enter comments.
4. Initiate review.

In my eyes, using Adobe Reader for reviewing has the following advantages over using printed material.

• Reviews take up hard drive space instead of desk space. I have much more of the former than the latter, so this arrangement makes sense. I'd also wager that disk space is cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than desk space.
  
• I can archive reviews digitally by using source control instead of in a box under my desk. Boxes take up space and are heavy. As the company grows and we move desks, I don't have to lug around boxes of old documentation. They're all available for me on the server.
• Similarly, when I return to Austin from Shanghai, I'll have instant access to all my old reviews without involving FedEx or DHL.
  
• While I'm here in Shanghai, I can pass documents to reviewers/writers in Austin just as easily as I can pass documents to people in Mumbai, Cleveland, or any of our other offices.
• Electronic reviewing enables me to write pages and pages of edits (theoretically) under a tiny little note icon. This way if I have a long or detailed comment, I don't run out of room on the page, my comments don't jam together, and I avoid writing sideways or upside-down or things like that. Also, I type much faster and more efficiently than I write. And no one has to struggle to read my typing like they might have to do with my handwriting.
  
• If the reviewer/writer disagrees with an edit I made, they can state their reasons why in the comment itself. In this way we can have a sort of conversation about the edit itself. This conversation takes up no more space than the note icon itself, even though the discussion could theoretically be pages long. And the discussion is archived along with the PDF itself.
• Reviewers/writers can mark edits as Completed or Rejected. Similar to a bug-tracking database, actually. I then can print out (in either hard-copy or PDF form) an easy-to-read list of the edits I made and the writers' replies to these edits. This view also lets me see which edits the writer may have missed in their pass through the document. (It would be helpful to have some sort of function/command that immediately highlighted all reviews that didn't have a reply.)
• I can highlight important comments by altering the color and/or opacity of the marker. So I've developed a color-coded system for which edits are normal priority, which ones are really important, which ones are left-over from the last review, etc.
• If I need to work from home, I don't have to worry about printing out a review copy and taking it with me. I can just VPN into the office and continue reviewing normally.
  

The only limitations I could see are if I wanted to draw a figure, such as an equation, graph, or chart, directly onto the document. I don't know how I could do that without attaching a .JPG or something like that. But so far I haven't run across this situation. The Drawing tools have been sufficient. I wonder if there's a way to attach image files to a PDF or something like that.

It also might be helpful to have a mode where you could edit the PDF directly, along the lines of MS Word's "Track Changes" feature. There may be a way to do this that I haven't yet discovered. But in our reviewing model at NI, we don't do that too much.

Kudos to Adobe for making the commenting feature not only robust, but also available in their free Reader program.