Toward a Technological Repertoire in Mediated Writing
Occasionally, the scholarship of technical communication produces a piece so central to my experiences and philosophies that I find myself returning to the literature repeatedly. Often the logic, vocabulary, and authority of a work coats my day-to-day with a reassuring glaze of sanity, and protects through the next season's rains.
Enter Shaun Slattery's Technical Writing as Textual Coordination: An Argument for the Value of Writers' Skill with Information Technology, a year-old encapsulation really, of the author's work in "composition, rhetoric, information technology, and writing in professional contexts.
His writings, presentations, and research into the production of professional information products from existing texts—a concept he calls textual coordination—informs many of the subconscious decisions many knowledge workers make in completing document-centric tasks.
I've long held that technical communicators and other business writers will experience significant gains in productivity and document quality by examining the tools and skills they bring to their writing. Slattery's work not only lends analytical evidence to that notion, but offers a framework professional writers can use in examination of their own work habits.
Textual Coordination and Mediation
I have adopted Slattery's term Textual Coordination for those document-centric portions of my job, as I agree it captures the essence of the value-add technical communicators bring more so than other terms tossed about in academia, and exceedingly better than what I hear from well-intentioned non-writer colleagues ('slapping together' and 'prettifying' come immediately to mind). And the new term also brings focus to the leveraging of IT to efficiently develop a professional product.
Slattery and others define Mediation in context as "the use of existing documents, notes, and software necessary to 'do' technical communication." The term's standard definitions, however are equally appropriate: intervene, oversee, solve, transfer. For this discussion, I would further centralize the end product in defining Mediation. Specifically, the writer's goal in mediating information is to produce typically one "document" in one medium (suite and single-sourcing project considerations aside). This clarification is necessary to any discussion of re-mediation as a skilled activity.
Thus Mediation is the manipulation of assets required for textual coordination. A vocabulary is begun, an environment created in which we can analyze and differentiate patterns. To quote Slattery:
Close observation and interviewing revealed a number of recurrent patterns of text and software use among writers that were purposeful techniques for performing textual coordination. Many of these techniques may seem obvious they identify writing processes that many of us use all the time. However, these practices have not yet been systematically studied by researchers of writing, nor are they part of our methods of teaching writing.
In my experience, those workplace issues surrounding the "doing" of technical communication (beyond the dictates of Microsoft, Chicago, and your authoring tool's user manual) are disappointingly considered matters of preference. I've witnessed such variations in personal preference between writers equate directly to variations in timeliness, accuracy, and quality of work. Team effectiveness, credibility, even morale can swing from these hinges. And so the research and evangelism of Slattery and others like him is all the more important to practitioners and students of the field who tragically either learned or are learning that tools are but a necessary evil, speed bumps on the information design highway.
Five Mediation Strategies
Following are the techniques Slattery identifies in his piece as shared practices among technical communicators. I've done my best to define each—using quotes as necessary—and have added my thoughts as they pertain specifically to my own circumstance. These are methods writers in a computerized work environment use to "do" technical communication. See how many you can identify from your experience:
1. RE-USE: In an attempt at applying a formalized moniker to an often subconscious process, Slattery proposes three distinct methods with which writers leverage existing content in creating new works: Whole Cloth, Pastiche, and Direct & Indirect Incorporation. Each involves a specific position of the source document in the writer's value hierarchy—not necessarily in terms of its ideas, but its presentation of tone, diction, and vocabulary. Media format also plays a part here; obviously, a source document in cocktail napkin format will require some indirect incorporation and maybe a phone call.
Skilled writers will move easily between strategies as well. The closer the source document to the writer's project goals (purpose, audience, etc.), the more appropriate the whole cloth approach. The writer can then move quickly into the levels of edit phase and closure. And so the writer's re-use strategy decisions lend themselves easily to an efficiency metric. The frequency with which the correct strategy is adopted up-front (obviating the need for re-work) directly impacts project duration, and is thus a good measurement of both information literacy ("What do I have?") and technological literacy ("What can I do with it?").
2. REMEDIATION: In practice, the movement of content from one format to another, is an unglamorous core function of the technical communicator. As both support and sublime example, I quote Slattery:
Occasionally an entire project involves the transfer of information from one medium to another, from a Word document to HTML for example. In both cases, writers must be adept in remediating texts and be aware of problems that arise when a text goes from one medium to another (such as managing format differences or the markup tags that generate different kinds of display). One writer characterized the ability to "take different forms [media] of information and put them into one usable place" as a "core function" of technical communicators.
Today, while an entire industry has sprung up around "usable places" and markup languages are available to anticipate remediation, still the writer must often move content from e-mail to FrameMaker; from PDF to Word; from voicemail to online Help; from that napkin to Visio; and (horror of horrors) from a Word document riddled with in-line formatting, text boxes, and floating annotated screenshots, to one using styles, tables, and optimized graphics.
The precise number of "Remediation Pairs" can generally be determined by squaring the available platforms in a given environment; the five examples in the previous paragraph alone imply 25 potential pairings. Taken together, a writer's individual best practices for completing these tasks form a "bag of tricks" that rarely finds its way into a résumé or an interview, but can make all the difference in day-to-day job effectiveness.
When I encounter <strong>code snippets</strong> on a rendered web page or an un- expected line break, I'm often seeing a failure in remediation compounded by a missed edit. The good writer catches the edit. The savvy writer leverages tools and experience in the development stage to anticipate those outcomes.
3. STAGING: The arrangement of texts and tools is an obvious strategy that experienced writers perform by rote. Yet, analyzing staging practices, as Slattery has done, yields specifics worth nothing.
- Long-term Staging of the work environment—from usable local and network directory structures to folder and application shortcuts to the ergonomically-considered arrangement of the workstation—provides a backdrop for efficient and flexible work processes.
- Short-term Staging, which flows from the long-term when done right, involves the efficient transition from a neutral environment to one that is optimized for the task at hand. An example would be moving from an empty computer desktop to a cascading arrangement of several source e-mails and a target document in Word. I consider short-term staging and Viewing as key components of Constellations (both discussed below).
4. VIEWING: In contrast to the physical arrangement of materials (be they on a screen or on a desk), Viewing involves the configuring of staged materials to fit a task. Depending on the specific work to be done, examples of view management can include Word's Views, Rulers, and Mark-up; code versus WYSIWYG in most any respectable web development app; palette arrays in the land of Adobe; arrangement of source documents or book chapters around the writer's chair (a wonderful example from Slattery); down to card sorts in Post-It form on a conference room wall.
By exercising control over views of staged materials before and during work, writers can realize significant time savings in mediation. Downtime Investments made reading product documentation more than pay for themselves in this stage of mediation as much as any other.
5. CONSTELLATION: If Staging is the arrangement of tools and materials, and Viewing is their specific contextualized configuration, then a unique pairing of the two must exist for each task in a writer's purview. For example, raw composition is arguably best accomplished in Word's Normal view (no markup, no chrome, with serifs please), while page layout is quick and easy in Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG view, but direct interrogation of code is often necessary for attribute tweaks and integration of scripting. And when I'm editing, I like easy access to one authority or another. For preflight of a document for print, give me Word's Print view "two up" (that is, with the zoom set to facing pages).
Slattery refers to these "recurrent patterns of mediating artifacts" as Constellations. And outside of the tell-tale jacket and scarf draped over the back of the workstation chair or the occasional radio buzz, a writer's constellation (or any knowledge worker's for that matter) is the reigning indication that that individual is in the office today, but is probably fetching coffee.
Constellations can too often be the unplanned results of a writer's work—one small configuration after another as the writer identifies additional needed tools. But by leveraging identified constellation patterns, any writer may preserve focus, ramp up faster, and realize gains in productivity.
Technological Repertoire and Collaborative Development
By applying this vocabulary to the strategies of mediated writing, writers can compartmentalize their work with greater detail, more clearly audit their work environment for optimization, target skill areas for upgrade, and better communicate to co-workers and subject matter experts the importance of templates, styles, and process throughout document development. Slattery again:
Our textual coordination practices can be understood as an attempt to control the environmental conditions in which we do knowledge work. Those writers who are best able to control environmental conditions and maintain operational fluency are best able to stay focused on achieving higher-order goals. It can be very difficult to keep one's audience in mind when all you want to do is get an image to resize correctly. The value of the technological repertoire is that it provides flexibility in managing a text-based work environment.
Indeed, writers should take it upon themselves to increase the technological repertoire of their subject matter experts. By sharing mediation strategies specific to the conditions under which a content producer must operate, the writer pushes that labor to an earlier point in the cycle and spares valuable bandwidth. As a bonus, that expert is often genuinely grateful for having attained a new skill she can apply in other areas. Everybody wins.
Now many would argue that textual coordination is not a creative act; I've even heard it from that vocal minority of practitioners who are otherwise free of esteem issues. But tell that to the brick mason, the architect, the city planner. Do we not each of us begin with the materials commissioned and apply our unique skills to produce something new and cohesive?
Something with an innate value far greater than its component parts?
Michelangelo was a coordinator in marble and paint.
In conjunction with the "higher order" competencies—information design, adult learning theory, workplace literacy, etc.—technological repertoire is an invaluable metric to use in evaluating writer productivity. And the degree to which a writer can successfully elevate the repertoire of experts and content producers can be directly correlated to team productivity and ultimate value-add.
I intend to formally enact programs in my organization based on these principles and will report on results.
