Robert Desprez Communications

COULD TECHNICAL WRITING BE PERFORMED BY SOFTWARE?

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Do you think a soft­ware pro­gram could per­form your job?

Before you scoff, a U.S.-based com­pa­ny has cre­at­ed an algo­rithm that takes data, like sports sta­tis­tics, com­pa­ny finan­cial reports, and hous­ing starts, and turns them into news­pa­per articles.

The code is the work of Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence, offer­ing proof of the progress of arti­fi­cial intelligence—the abil­i­ty of com­put­ers to mim­ic human reasoning.

The New York Times wrote about the com­pa­ny this month: “For years, pro­gram­mers have exper­i­ment­ed with soft­ware that wrote such arti­cles, typ­i­cal­ly for sports events, but these efforts had a for­mu­la­ic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them…[but] arti­cles pro­duced by Nar­ra­tive Sci­ence are different.”

Here’s an exam­ple writ­ten by the software:

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51–10 after the third quar­ter. Wis­con­sin added to its lead when Rus­sell Wil­son found Jacob Ped­er­sen for an eight-yard touch­down to make the score 44–3 …”

Not too shab­by, con­sid­er­ing it was writ­ten by software.

The com­pa­ny appar­ent­ly has 20 clients so far. On its web site, the com­pa­ny notes that the tech­nol­o­gy is being used for sports sto­ries, finan­cial reports, real estate analy­ses, sales and oper­a­tions reports, and mar­ket research con­tent. No men­tion of tech­ni­cal writ­ing but I don’t see why it couldn’t be used for some documents.

I believe that the tech­nol­o­gy could be used for doc­u­ment­ing bug fix­es and new fea­tures that might appear in Release Notes. Of course, there are many things that a writer does every day—such as project man­age­ment and interviewing—that would be dif­fi­cult for a piece of soft­ware to emulate.

This arti­cle reminds me of a blog entry I wrote last year: “In short, some of the high­ly ana­lyt­i­cal jobs are becom­ing com­modi­ties that can be per­formed by a com­put­er or an inex­pen­sive work­er in Asia.” See my ear­li­er blog entry.

What do you think? Could a piece of soft­ware poten­tial­ly write some of your content?

WAYS TO USE TECHNOLOGY TO CONNECT WITH USERS

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Most tech­ni­cal writ­ers have lit­tle idea how their deliv­er­ables are used, if at all.

We strive to ensure that the con­tent is tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, that the deliv­er­ables adhere to the com­pa­ny style guide, and that the items ship before or on the agreed-upon deadlines.

After suc­cess­ful­ly ship­ping, mean­ing­ful user feed­back is hard­ly a del­uge, if there’s any­thing at all. More real­is­ti­cal­ly, it is a trickle—some anec­do­tal feed­back that a user liked some­thing we wrote, or an e‑mail that the sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive thought it hit the mark.

Web 2.0 makes it eas­i­er to con­nect to users. Any­one with an Inter­net con­nec­tion and a com­put­er can cre­ate a YouTube video, add some con­tent to a Wikipedia page, write a blog, and so on. For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, this means it’s easy for our users to add com­ments on our help top­ics or web pages.

Here are two rel­a­tive­ly simple—and free—ways you can use tech­nol­o­gy to con­nect with your users.

Feed­back Forms and Commenting
At http://wufoo.com/examples/, you can add many types of forms to a web page or help top­ic with­out hav­ing to code any­thing. Using an embed­ded Con­tact Form, your users do not have to leave the site and you do not have to dis­sem­i­nate an email address that could be a tar­get of spam mail.

Anoth­er site worth vis­it­ing is http://disqus.com, which enables your users to add com­ments to a web site or online help top­ic. Sim­i­lar to a blog, your users can respond to a help top­ic that you’ve writ­ten and you can mon­i­tor and respond to the feed­back by e‑mail using your com­put­er, iPhone, or Android phone. Dis­qus also enables users to click a but­ton when they like a top­ic or web page you’ve authored, with­out requir­ing them to add a comment.

If you’d pre­fer not to add HTML code to your online help or web pages, you can also use Adobe Robo­Help to enable com­ment­ing as you long as you use the company’s Adobe AIR out­put for­mat. To learn more about the details of this option, vis­it tech­ni­cal writer Sarah Maddox’s blog.

HOW GOOGLE CHANGED OUR BRAINS

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Google’s search is so effec­tive at find­ing infor­ma­tion that it’s changed what we choose to remem­ber, accord­ing to Friday’s issue of the jour­nal Science.

When we are aware of where to find infor­ma­tion, we’re less like­ly to remem­ber it, some­thing called “The Google Effect” by lead psy­chol­o­gist Bet­sy Spar­row of Colum­bia University.

The study asserts we’re not becom­ing less intel­li­gent but the ubiq­ui­tous search engine appears to be chang­ing how we remem­ber things. For many of us, we’re hap­py to for­get rote infor­ma­tion, know­ing that it can be retrieved using a search engine.

Google’s search engine is amaz­ing con­sid­er­ing that it index­es mil­lions of web pages and still pro­vides with you with good results. In June alone, web surfers used Google 11.1 bil­lion times, accord­ing to the web site Search Engine Watch.

From what I’ve seen, the search that’s avail­able in a main­stream Help Author­ing Tool (HAT) isn’t near­ly as effec­tive. And if your users are used to results pro­vid­ed by Google (and who isn’t?), the search in online help is bound to disappoint.

Still, even Google’s search engine has its lim­its. Ear­li­er in the year, Forbes pub­lished an arti­cle called “Google Finds No Friend In Face­book As Social Sur­pass­es Search” that states, “Face­book became the most vis­it­ed site in the U.S. for the first time sur­pass­ing Google and Yahoo.” Author Anne Gen­tle wrote in her blog: “…you are more like­ly to get use­ful links by ask­ing your friends and col­leagues about cer­tain top­ics than you are going to get them by search­ing on Google.” That’s prob­a­bly why Google just launched Google+, a social net­work­ing site that is meant to com­pete with Facebook.

In any case, the search offered by a HAT could be a lot more accu­rate and cus­tomiz­able so that writ­ers can con­trol the results offered to users. Who knows? Maybe one day we could make it easy for users to rec­om­mend cer­tain top­ics, like the fea­tures found in Face­book and Google+.

IS HELP 2.0 HYPED?

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There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion about “Help 2.0” in which users will be able to eas­i­ly com­ment on the con­tent you’ve writ­ten in a help topic.

The Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Communication’s Inter­com mag­a­zine recent­ly pub­lished an arti­cle titled “Under­stand­ing the Help 2.0 Rev­o­lu­tion.” I have to admit that I thought the arti­cle con­tained some excit­ing ideas: for the first time tech­ni­cal writ­ers may have an online dia­log with our read­ers using tech­nolo­gies like web posts and commenting.

In the same vein, author and teacher Clay Shirky wrote a book called Cog­ni­tive Sur­plus. In it, he asserts that North Amer­i­cans are watch­ing less tele­vi­sion and are embrac­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies like blogs and wikis. Col­lec­tive­ly, we can pool our efforts to achieve amaz­ing results. Just look at the colos­sal effort of web sites like Wikipedia.

But I think we have a long way to go. For all this talk of col­lab­o­ra­tion, usabil­i­ty guru Jakob Nielsen argues that only one per­cent of peo­ple con­tribute to a site, nine per­cent are inter­mit­tent con­trib­u­tors, and 90 per­cent just read the con­tent. So if Nielsen is right, most peo­ple are still being pas­sive. Doesn’t sound that dif­fer­ent to watch­ing television.

Here’s an excerpt from Nielsen’s web site:

“Blogs have even worse par­tic­i­pa­tion inequal­i­ty than is evi­dent in the 90–9‑1 rule that char­ac­ter­izes most online com­mu­ni­ties. With blogs, the rule is more like 95–5‑0.1. Inequal­i­ties are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurk­ers. Accord­ing to Wikipedi­a’s “about” page, it has only 68,000 active con­trib­u­tors, which is 0.2% of the 32 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors it has in the U.S. alone.”

Grant­ed, Nielsen’s research is about five years old. Maybe more peo­ple are now con­tribut­ing? But I doubt it’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly more.

Here‘s the bot­tom line. If you’ve cre­at­ed a web site or help sys­tem that incor­po­rates Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies like com­ment­ing, don’t be sur­prised if you ini­tial­ly receive a trick­le of respons­es from your read­ers. My bet is that tech­ni­cal writ­ers will need to reg­u­lar­ly pro­mote their help sys­tems or web sites to encour­age more read­ers to post their feed­back. If you want an online dia­log with cus­tomers, it‘s not just a mat­ter of “build it and they will come.”

TECHNICAL WRITERS ARE RELUCTANT SELF-MARKETERS

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I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to tech­ni­cal writ­ers who’ve said to me that they dis­like self-marketing.

If you’re employ­ee and you don’t like mar­ket­ing your­self, it may mean you suf­fer from a lack of vis­i­bil­i­ty with­in your com­pa­ny. Peo­ple know your name but they may not under­stand what you do or how you add any val­ue to the orga­ni­za­tion. If you’re a con­tract writer and you dis­like mar­ket­ing, the results can be more serious—a track record that is marred by long peri­ods of unemployment.

Why do tech­ni­cal writ­ers dis­like mar­ket­ing so much? Here are a cou­ple of guesses:

  • Most tech­ni­cal writ­ers are intro­verts. By their very nature, tech­ni­cal writ­ers don’t like to stand in the lime­light or toot their own horns. They enjoy work­ing alone, not net­work­ing, and cer­tain­ly not pre­sent­ing a top­ic to others.
  • They haven’t learned about mar­ket­ing. Many writ­ers I’ve talked to often wrin­kle their noses when talk­ing about mar­ket­ing as if it’s a dirty word.

Mar­ket­ing, in my mind, is vital to the ongo­ing suc­cess of an orga­ni­za­tion. As a con­tract writer, I believe it’s impor­tant to remind clients and prospects about who I am and the ser­vices I offer, even when I’m work­ing on a long-term con­tract. If you don’t remind peo­ple of the ser­vices you provide—whether it’s an e‑mail, blog post, or upcom­ing pre­sen­ta­tion you’re sched­uled to deliver—people for­get about you. And if they for­get you, you won’t hear about upcom­ing jobs.

Some­times peo­ple dis­like some­thing because they don’t under­stand it. If you’re a con­tract tech­ni­cal writer strug­gling with lin­ing up con­tracts and feel that mar­ket­ing is not your forte, I’d rec­om­mend you read Duct Tape Mar­ket­ing by John Jantsch, which pro­vides an excel­lent overview of mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties for a small busi­ness. Who knows? You might start enjoy­ing mar­ket­ing after all.

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290