Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
December 2008/January 2009
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter December 2008/January 2009 |
The January meeting is on Wednesday, January 21, 2009, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
We tend to assume that most of the time we are perfect -- that our efforts will lead to the expected results. However, no human activity is free from error. Developers, for example, assume that bugs will be in their code, and both waterfall and agile methodologies contain entire cycles devoted to finding and fixing bugs. Most documentation groups, however, do not build in error checking except at the most cursory level, based on the 19th Century publishing practices.
Documentation groups needs to stop assuming that any tech writer is perfect, even though we all want to be. Instead, we must develop robust systems that function at multiple points in the process. These systems take into account human error, similar to developer checkin reviews.
Only by shifting the viewpoint from "I'm usually perfect at what I do" to "I occasionally make mistakes and want to flag and correct them before the customer sees them," can a technical writing group develop a system that expects mistakes and provides mechanisms for correcting them.