Accelerated Authoring™ @ Method M

Working on training my own writers in writing as little as possible, and having that little extremely focused on user needs, we developed an in-house course called Bare Bones Communications. 

The syllabus is now posted on the web — and comments are more than welcome.  One of the goals is to help reorient writers moving, or thinking about moving in the future, to DITA or other topic-based authoring approaches.
Katriel

Productivity — when you think about topic-based authoring, think of the productivity gains.  Writers work faster and better when presented with a fill-in-the-skeleton, and when they don’t worry about look and feel.

Reuse, consistency, the ability to create custom documents for readers are all big factors in deciding to move to topic-based authoring.  But don’t forget productivity.
Katriel

In a previous post we talked about Accelerated Authoring™ as a collection of tools and methods to enable improved productivity for knowledge workers. Content controls are part of the Accelerated Authoring collection and are the subject of this post. Specifically, we will talk about using Content Controls to create highly formatted documents.

Most companies have multiple series of documents – say case studies or application notes – that will be prepared over time. It might be a good idea for the first one in each series to be prepared by a graphic designer (or at least by a team member with design skills).

In practice, keeping the design from slipping over time as writers and subject matter experts edit documents in the series can be challenging. Inadvertent clicks tend to cause images to move, alignment to be lost and other changes that result in:

• Design deterioration – documents have a less consistent and less professional look.
• Time and energy lost in trying to get back to the original formatting.

To read more about Editing Highly Formatted Documents in Word – and how Content Controls can be used as part of a complete methodology for enabling staff to create and update highly designed documents, download content controls and making beautiful documents.

Look for the next post about anticipating and preventing document gaffes (proactive document quality). Katriel

Reasonable folk might disagree on how to improve the productivity of workers who spend hours each day working with a word processor, but there should be general agreement on the following list of goals:

• Spend less time formatting documents, and more time creating value.
• Produce documents that are more readable and more aesthetic.
• Enable easy reuse of content by:
  • Copying and pasting between documents and from documents to e-mail.
  • Reusing blocks of information between and within documents.
• Easier to update documents.
• Easier to find content in documents.
• Provide “just enough” information in documents.

Accelerated Authoring™ is a collection of tools and methods to enable attaining these goals. Content controls are part of the Accelerated Authoring collection and are the subject of the first post in the Accelerated Authoring series.

To read more about Accelerated Authoring™, which is an important part of structgured authoring, download: Find out what structured authoring is and why it matters.

BTW, Accelerated Authoring™ is a trademark of Method M Ltd.