The Ten Commandments for Technical Requirements: VII: Presentation: The Art of Gladness

Scot Witt, Sunday, August 19, 2007 @ 2:21 pm

I learned the first secret rule of technical writing in my first week. It floored me.

Content and organization are not the most important thing. Presentation is the most important thing.

Why?

Your readers assume you know more about the subject than you do right at the beginning! They need to be able to decode it and make the information their own as quickly as possible.

The first way of making it accessible is to make sure everything's properly and consistently spelled. You can't rely on spell check. Only 'Romantic' will show as an error in an unmodified spell checker:

And Honestly, what Is on the Rise that is taking the Reading world by storm, are these Romantic thug Books about the Boyfriend that lives the life of Crime and the girlfriend that is trying to deal with It. Or The Cheating man etc.

-My First Day

Here are the rules:

1. Make sure everything's spelled correctly- have at least one other set of eyes go over it before presenting it.

2. Keep the grammar gaffs to a minimum- if use a reader's pet grammar or word error, s/he will look much more closely at your work. Things that set me off include:

• 'entitled' for ''titled' (a book or CD isn't entitled to anything).
• Using a plural pronoun for a group (such as The City Council.... they voted against it, it should be it voted).
• Your for You're (jeez people!)
• Hidding behind or pompusly using big words- it's start- not initialize; it's end- not terminate; You know what the definition of orientate is? To orient; defer action means wait. Any writer has a bunch of favorites- just ask. 

3. Use color when it makes sense. Always use color if part of your audience includes executives. One time a little inconsequential bar graph using three colors saved one of my projects. Go figure.

4. Use graphics when it makes sense and when it aids in understanding. If the graphic doesn't speak for itself, don't use it.

5. In print- make sure you use the paper-wasting one inch margins and stick them. I know. It is stupid. I can't tell you how manyt times the word 'dense' came up with a moved it down to half inch margins. 

6. If you don't have a graphics designer:

• Follow the old newspaper typology rule- make the header font san serif and the body serif or vice versa.
• Use the serif font for captions in 8 point or less. 
• Use the san serif for table headers in bold. 
• Don't ever use more than two fonts- and be conservative in your selection. Times New Roman and Arial (Helvetica) are my friends in print. I go a little crazy and use Verdana is on-line publications when I have a choice.

7. Always use a title page.

8. Make sure the title page has all of the logos of companys involved.

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tech development

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