Writing is Design
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My presentation at TCWorld India 2015. In this interactive workshop, the focus is on learning good writing with the help of a few design blunders. The session is about the design of writing that decides the usability of content. We have always heard people say (and probably said this ourselves), “One cannot teach good writing.” However, we all understand whether a piece of writing is good or bad. We can prove it by giving a set of reasons to support our opinion. Maybe there is a way to teach good writing. Visualizing a piece of writing helps in learning and teaching good writing. I am proposing a technique to learn good writing through visual reviews.
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Writing is Design
- 1. Writing is Design Mugdha Kulkarni © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 2. Agenda - Writing as the essential skill - Visualization of content (not layout) - Seven samples of bad designs - Plan for better writing 2 © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 3. 3 What Not to Expect from this Workshop? © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Neither about document layout Nor about information structure
- 4. 4 What to Expect from this Workshop? © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 5. 5 Why Teach Writing? © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. How many technical writers are actually writers?
- 6. 6 Writing – The Fundamental Skill © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 7. 7 Reviews – Not an answer to bad writing! © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 8. 8 Example Paragraph © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Read and critique the content given to you.
- 9. 9 Writing Sample I © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. An automotive braking system is a group of mechanical, electronic and hydraulically activated components which use friction / heat to stop a moving vehicle. Brakes translate a push of a pedal to slowing down your car. One major factor that acts on a car to help it come to a complete stop is friction. Friction is resistance between two objects when they come into contact. The hydraulic system is the other main principle used in the brake system. The way it works is that the pressure applied on a closed fluid is transmitted undiminished to every part of the fluid as well as to the walls of the container. The major components of the brake system include the brake pedal, made up of a support axis, a push rod and a pad for the foot to press. When the brake pedal is pressed, it applies a force to the push rod, which transfers the force to the master cylinders. This creates hydraulic pressure inside the cylinders. There are two cylinders in a braking system - the master cylinder, and the slave cylinder. The third component of the brake system is the brake caliper and the disc assembly. As the slave cylinder applies pressure to the brake pad, the pad transfers air pressure to the rotor, and friction occurs.
- 10. 10 Example Paragraph © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. How do you imagine the writer will take the reviews?
- 11. 11 What happens on giving feedback? © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The less said the better!
- 12. 12 The Solution © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Establish the program.
- 13. 13 © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The Bad Designs Create and use the stamps of design to give feedback.
- 14. 14 Sample I – Crowded Content © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Control user’s learning.
- 15. 15 Writing Sample I © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. An automotive braking system is a group of mechanical, electronic and hydraulically activated components which use friction / heat to stop a moving vehicle. Brakes translate a push of a pedal to slowing down your car. One major factor that acts on a car to help it come to a complete stop is friction. Friction is resistance between two objects when they come into contact. The hydraulic system is the other main principle used in the brake system. The way it works is that the pressure applied on a closed fluid is transmitted undiminished to every part of the fluid as well as to the walls of the container. The major components of the brake system include the brake pedal, made up of a support axis, a push rod and a pad for the foot to press. When the brake pedal is pressed, it applies a force to the push rod, which transfers the force to the master cylinders. This creates hydraulic pressure inside the cylinders. There are two cylinders in a braking system - the master cylinder, and the slave cylinder. The third component of the brake system is the brake caliper and the disc assembly. As the slave cylinder applies pressure to the brake pad, the pad transfers air pressure to the rotor, and friction occurs.
- 16. 16 Choose a visual. © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The stamp
- 17. 17 Sample II - Complexity © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Do you expect the users to jot down notes from your content?
- 18. 18 Writing Sample II © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. According to Marx, he read utilitarianism and he disagreed with it. He feels humans are alienated from the following nature, body, others, and one’s own intellectual ability. Marx believes that people are alienated from nature or comes to hate the object he or she creates. In some cases you can say this is true although people are at times happy and pleased with the product of his or her . Alienation of the body strength, agility are all controlled by the capitalist for hid benefit. Alienation of others says workers see other workers simply as competitors for the rewards they are offered. Finally intellectual alienation is faced with contradictions. In Marxist terminology a contidiction is a notion that is correct by everyone around you but clearly false if thought about in any length of time by yourself.
- 19. 19 Create an interesting stamp. © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The stamp
- 20. 20 Sample III – Content Length © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 21. 21 Writing Sample III © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The average amount of commercials a thirty minute program airs is something like eight minutes long. That leaves 22 minutes of programming, shorter if there are more commercials to air. The reality is that without commercials there would be no program. That includes your local news station as well. Advertisers pay big bucks to air their commercials, their money is what allows you to view the day’s important events on your television. They control how much news will be given on any given day. That however is not the only thing they control. They also control what goes on the news. News stations are careful as not to offend their advertisers with any of their stories in fear that they may revoke their commercials and with it take a huge sum of money. Commercial television regulates what we watch more than we think. It is nearly impossible to believe what we see on the news. First, the news is edited beyond belief. How are we supposed to form opinions off of a two and a half minute (the average amount of minutes) story? Take the presidential campaigns for example, we are given only ten seconds of each of the candidate’s debate speech.
- 22. 22 Stamps can be fun! © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The stamp
- 23. 23 Sample IV – Lack of Visuals © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Who wants to read it?
- 24. 24 Writing Sample IV © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The hydraulic system is the other main principle used in the brake system. The way it works is that the pressure applied on a closed fluid is transmitted undiminished to every part of the fluid as well as to the walls of the container. With the space getting compressed in the cylinder, the fluid gets restricted in a smaller area. When this happens, the pressure inside the cylinder becomes greater. To make things easier to understand, imagine two pistons connected with each other. If you apply a small force to a small area of one piston, the same force is transmitted to the other piston of the same size. You will see that the piston on one side moves the same distance as the piston on the other side because the areas of the cylinders are exactly the same.
- 25. 25 Stamps add color to our work. © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The stamp
- 26. 26 Sample V – Fragmented Content © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Evvvverything in there!
- 27. 27 Writing Sample V © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The moon is the only natural satellite of Earth. The moon orbits the Earth from 384400 km and has an average speed of 3700 km per hour. To date, only some astronauts have been to the moon. A moon is also known as natural satellite. However, here the term moon is used for the Earth’s moon. The moon is nearest to the earth. It has no light of its own. It shines with the reflected light of the sun. There is no air on the moon. The force of gravity on the surface of the moon is about one-sixth of that on the surface of the earth.
- 28. 28 Stamps start speaking more than a comment. © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The stamp
- 29. 29 Sample VI - Lack of Examples © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. From what users know… …To what they need to learn.
- 30. 30 Writing Sample VI Probability is the measure of the likeliness that an event will occur. Probability is quantified as a number between 0 and 1 (where 0 indicates impossibility and 1 indicates certainty). The higher the probability of an event, the more certain we are that the event will occur. © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 31. 31 One stamp – one message © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The stamp
- 32. 32 Sample VII - Inconsistent User Experience © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. I always find the answer! I never fail if I see Help!!! I always understand it!!
- 33. 33 Writing Sample I © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 34. 34 Choose your visuals carefully! © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The stamp
- 35. 35 © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Stamps How? When? And other details!
- 36. 36 Creating Stamps © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Live Demo!
- 37. 37 © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. The Plan Decide what works for you, and act on it.
- 38. 38 Taking the Bull Head On © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Don’t wait up. Start already!
- 39. 39 Coming back to Writing – THE Fundamental Skill © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Balance your time in silos and in collaboration.
- 40. 40 Writing – THE Fundamental Skill © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 41. 41 Writing – THE Fundamental Skill © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc.
- 42. 42 © Copyright 2000-2015 TIBCO Software Inc. Thank you! Mugdha Kulkarni mkulkarn@tibco.com mail.mugdha@gmail.com Images credit : Google images
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone. I’m Mugdha Kulkarni, and I work with TIBCO Software out of their Pune office. I am also the Pune city representative of STC India. Today I will be sharing a very easy and effective visual technique to improve your own writing or the writing of your team mates.
- In this workshop, we will first understand the importance of writing as our core skill. Then we will see a visualization technique to improve writing skills, which you can implement either for yourself, or for your team mates. These visualizations focus mainly on the issues in writing, and hence are visualizations of bad writing. We will see seven samples of such visualizations or designs. And lastly, we will see how to plan this program for your team or for yourself.
- Writing is Design is almost a one-line haiku. Everyone can interpret it the way they want. So let’s set our expectations right about this workshop. The design I am talking about here is not the document layout, or formatting, or template. It’s also not about the information design or information structure or the Table of Contents.
- Rather the session is about visualizing the content. When the writer and the mentor both visualize the same content, there’s some magic that can happen. Learning and teaching good writing becomes easier with these visualization techniques. In short, in these 40 minutes, we are going to learn how to teach writing.
- But why do we need to teach writing? After all, don’t we expect the entrants of the profession to be good writers first? Let’s look at it from another angle. Do you believe that each technical writer today is a writer at heart? How many of us consider ourselves real writers? People come into TW from various backgrounds and professions. They may not be formally educated in TW. Not all the courses pay attention to the core writing skills. Obviously, there’s a serious need to teach writing to your team mates. Or if you are the lone writer in your company, there’s a serious need to learn writing. Is there?
- If you or your team mate is not a good writer, what are the problems arising from it? – Say, badly written emails? Poor communication with peers or management? Other functions looking down on your profession? Calling you copy-paste people? The list just goes on. What’s the basic problem behind all these issues? Writing. So even if writing skill tops the basic requirements list when you were hiring or were hired, there’s a serious need to improve writing. I agree it is difficult to teach writing, it is difficult to take time out to mentor your team mates… So what is the luxurious solution we offer?
- Reviews. Linguistic reviews are still a luxury at workplace. Most of the companies will never have a reviewer or an editor. If it’s a team of writers, peer reviews is a common practice. However, the actual reviews and their depth depends on the deadlines and time available for the review cycle. We never get to do a substantive review. We have to be happy with the copy edits we get or we give. The review comments address grammatical and stylistic compliance issues than the basic writing issues. Plus these reviews come in the picture as we near the deadline. I must share with you all this titbit I recently learned. Jeffrey Archer, the famous novelist, had come to India to promote his books. When he was in Pune, he said, he writes 18 drafts of his manuscript. Eighteen drafts. Forget developing a draft 18 times, we don’t even get to read our own content thrice before publishing it. Of course we are not expecting the same level of literary masterpiece, so we can let that go. However, we must admit that we don’t really have a choice when it comes to the most basic skill. We must learn, teach, and hone good writing skills. The question is how?!
- Distribute exercise sheets. Exercise time – 5 min. One example for each flaw.
- You all knew or assumed I am asking you to criticize the content. You trusted me enough not to have the writer in this room. Now imagine – This girl here is the writer. Tell her the same issues you told just now. What happens? What comes into play is a completely different set of dynamics. What was supposed to be a simple exchange of knowledge and ideas becomes a emotional experience. I am not saying this happens everywhere and with everyone. However, the chances of it happening are pretty high. The effect?
- In an effort to avoid negativity, the feedback process or the review process is completed as a statutory requirement. Result? – Writing never improves. Even if we assume that your organization has a good editor/editing guidelines and processes, the whole idea of reviews sticks to fixing problems at the last minute. As we saw before, it focuses only on the grammatical and stylistic compliance. That’s why, I’ve thought of this visualization technique with a hope to make our lives simpler and the process more effective.
- Establish a mentoring program focused only on writing. Once you finalize the members who will participate in this program, allocate a specific time period – of say a month or two. Define the issues in writing that you want to address in this time frame. These will be your goals. Once you decide all such things, make sure each member in your program team understands and appreciates the structure and goals of this program. By now, you must have realized, this is an overhead activity. It is an investment. This program works better for interns or inexperienced writers, and assumes that the mentor and the interns are committed to sharpening the writing skill. Precisely the reason why, this activity should have a definite start and end. Just like a customer service week, celebrate a “Back-to-Writing Month”! Prepare a few guidelines and processes or best practices for this program. That will help you all be on the same page.
- Once you set all these aspects in place, it’s time to define the visuals for each type of writing issue. Make sure the issues in writing you are trying to fix are not too many. Create a visual for each issue, and make sure each team member understands and interprets that visual in the same consistent way. We will be creating stamps of these visuals, which can then be used for a review comment without a word. By the way, don’t stop at defining the visuals. Also define the actions to be taken after receiving a visual stamp. Let us see seven samples of such visualizations of bad writing. Why not begin with the paragraph we saw earlier?
- The classic problem in the paragraph is that the writer is talking about too many concepts and components at once. What’s the issue with such writing? You give the control of the learning in the user’s hand. If you sow too many seeds, you won’t know which one might germinate. Do you want the user to learn whatever catches their fancy? Or are you directing them well towards something in particular?
- Saying, “It’s a watermelon. We need a mango.” is far more neutral than saying, “You are talking about so many ideas and facts at once. Deal with one at a time.” With imagery, writers start thinking about the one big seed. It helps them, sometimes even forces them, to identify the central idea. Once it is identified, the supporting ideas fall in place. Writing becomes easier. They will obviously start the paragraph with a topic sentence. Now let’s try and mark the next stamps on various other examples.
- Grammatically correct, small sentences also can be complex. Especially when they come after one another to form a paragraph. This is your chance to make writers understand the minimalism principles. A little on minimalism as how it’s not about less content – but less processing time for users. Exercise: Which of the paragraphs in the given samples comes closest to this problem? Identify it.
- I call it a twisty straw tumbler. What did you call it?
- Wordiness is a common problem. It’s rather an indicator of a cluttered mind. If the writer doesn’t have clarity, it won’t be translated to the content. Also note skimpy content. It indicates an empty mind. Encourage the writer to research more about the idea/thought/fact/task. Do you see a paragraph that fits this bill? Which one?
- You can use stamp of a long skirt if it’s something as wordy as the sample paragraph we chose. If the content is too less, draw a tutu there! ;) It’s better to choose a fun visual to make the point. Negative visuals leave the writer with a negative feeling. Visuals should make them laugh, and learn. When choosing fun visuals, also be aware of sensitivities of your team mates.
- Long lengthy paragraphs don’t invite the readers. We all know that retention of visually-rich information is supposed to be way higher than retention of textual information. If your content demands your team to create visuals, this writing issue might be on top of your list. Ready to find the paragraph that’s begging for a visual representation?
- This is the stamp I chose. Yours might be better!
- Sometimes, the writer has lots of information of the subject. However, weaving that information in a single thread might be a challenge. Do you see it happening in your writing or your team mate’s writing? I’m sure there’s one such paragraph in the samples I gave. Did you get it already?
- The central concept is obviously the moon. That’s why I would not use the watermelon stamp here.
- By now you must have got the idea of how to visualize, and how to use those visualizations as stamps.
- Today we understand this symbol of conversation as an IM application, and the visual for a tower signal as the range. Just like one of the basic principles in UI design, real-world analogies help users in content experience as well. Such examples and analogies provide users a highly intuitive and delightful experience. Extend such examples appropriately so that the unique and exciting experience it offers balances the familiar experiences with new ones. Encourage good real-world examples in writing. Do you see an example there that demands a real-world analogy?
- Even if you give a simple example of coin toss, the paragraph becomes easier for readers to understand.
- If you are working for a technical domain, help users with some code snippets. Nothing works like a working example.
- Building reliability in the docs is of utmost importance. If users are comfortable with the current style of docs, think twice before you make any drastic changes. Even if the changes are only to the writing style. Do you see the sample in there which shows this inconsistency in writing style? If users were already used to one style of writing, you are going to make them uncomfortable by introducing another style.
- If you choose a cape to indicate a super hero, you might draw it like a skirt, confusing the writer. Better you keep all the visual stamps distinct from each other. Exercise: In the given example sheet, is there a place where you feel the writer can do a better job at empowering the user?
- All the stamps we saw so far were samples. You can identify the recurring issues in the writer’s (or your own) writing and come up with your own stamps. You can also create stamps for good writing designs. Even a simple Thumbs up will do a great job in boosting the writer’s morale. Such positive stamps will indicate the areas in which the writer is getting better. You can also associate the good and bad stamps with some positive and negative marks – making the system measurable with time.
- How to create stamps? We will see a live demo on Adobe Acrobat. You can see if your reviewing tool supports the use of custom stamps. If not, you can always come up with an alternative method. Being a short-term exercise, it might not be too inconvenient to do it the old way – Drawing stamps on a printed draft.
- Let us summarize our learning. Explain separately for writers as well as mentors.
- Define the stamps. Bring the team on the same page. Define the time period. Define the goals.
- Establish that going in a silo is as important as being collaborative. Writing, by nature, is a lonely activity. Technical writing, on the other hand, needs to be extremely collaborative.
- If you are giving/receiving a lot of feedback, it is possible for the writer to feel intimidated. Assure them/yourself that bad writing is just the first step. Realize the importance of writing everyday, and acknowledge the benefits of this practice to keep up the motivation.
- Make sure that the writer starts finding the process of writing enjoyable. With subtle nudges, make sure they realize the joy and take pride in what they do. Once you see them writing with joy and pride, your job is over. They’ve set off on the path to becoming a good writer by themselves!
- Thanks for patiently listening and participating in this workshop today. Please do try this technique when you go back to work after this energizing conference. I would really love to understand how you are going through the process. Sharing our experiences will surely benefit us further. I would be glad to get connected with you socially, say on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks again to the organizers for having me, and to you all for tolerating me!