Read it, see it in practice
A very special book. If you ever manage or write documentation
This book is not a book about grammar. It applies the best ideas in information architecture and information usability that technical writers or commers can use.
If you're using Framemaker, Arbotext, Webworks, Flare, Blaze or even the newer RoboHelp generation of tools where 'single-sourcing' is the 'thing' to be talking about, this book is a must. Its necessary reading. It goes beyond writing and goes into helping you structure for single-sourcing.
You'll probably find new ideas, and applications in developing your doc projects that you can use immediately, simply by the way the book is written and presented. All the earlier and best reviews of this book are pretty head-on.
The guidelines that the book recommends are actually applied to in the development and authoring of the book...this is probably why i think this book is a rather 'special' book. There are lots of books on writing, clear and simply, but this book is the real deal. Short, concise applicable.
Somewhat disappointing
I was recently investigating options for single sourcing when I came across Kurt Ament's book Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation. Based on the glowing reviews the book received, I decided to order it from Amazon.com.
Unfortunately, the book was not what I expected. For the price of $[...] on Amazon, the book provides little help to experienced professional writers. My biggest complaint is that too many pages of the book are spent promoting the author's own ideas of style and usage rather than discussing true single sourcing issues. (134 out of 210 pages, to be precise, were dedicated to matters of style.) Some of the style and usage guidelines are handy for modular documentation, however, I believe each company should decide its own appropriate guide for style and usage rather than relying on the author's word. Had he couched his preferred guidelines as examples, perhaps I would be less inclined to view them negatively.
Granted, understanding how to simplify and standardize language is key to developing text for reuse within a body of work and reuse text for localization. Writers need to understand how to simplify and standardize text before starting to think about how to leverage tools for single sourcing. Describing how to use standard language, however, is different than promoting a writing style, and probably requires far fewer pages than Ament dedicated to it.
One of the reviews on Amazon raved about how well this book could be applied in conjunction with Information Mapping. I disagree. The author clearly does not approve of breaking processes or procedures into tables, which is a cornerstone of Information Mapping. In fact the author has very strict guidelines about when you should use a table and when you shouldn't. (Again, he is pontificating a particular style rather than offering solid advice on single sourcing.) Don't take my word for it; examine the table of contents very carefully before you buy this book.
What the book does well, is offer good general advice on where to start thinking about chuncking your documentation in order to reuse it again and again. Also, Ament provides a concise lexicon of single sourcing terms that will help you properly articulate your ideas to your teammates. Most of the flags and highlighting I used in the book were confined to chapters 1, 2, and 5.
This book might serve well in an introductory professional writing course, but if your company is seeking guidance on single sourcing, find a book that is tool specific or find a book that sticks to single sourcing and leaves style and usage decisions up to you.
An excellent primer on sound tech doc style, but not a roadmap for adopting a single source tool.
As other reviewers have pointed out, examine this book carefully before you buy it. This book provides excellent basic guidelines on writing technical documentation, and I recommend it strongly to tech doc managers and instructors as something to pass along to their entry level writers and students. Similarly, it might be a helpful resource for engineers or other technical contributors who find themselves having to prepare usable documents for readers outside of their team.
However, if you're an experienced technical writer looking for guidance on how to migrate your existing body of content from multiple authoring sources to a single source application, you need to look elsewhere. This book does not cover migration to or implementation of single source applications. I found Ann Rockley's book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy to be a helpful starting point for figuring out how to migrate to single source methods and tools.
Effective and proven method
The entire approach given in this book is consistent enough with Information MappingŪ that it can serve as a guide to learning that highly effective technique on your own. I was trained in Information MappingŪ in 2000 and have used the principles to excellent advantage since then. More importantly, those techniques - called 'single sourcing' in this book - foster the ability to create coherent documentation using geographically distributed teams. This is because the single sourcing technique described in this book is concerned with document design, which is based on a process that identifies requirements and bases the initial draft on procedures and knowledge instead of the more common approach of writing an ad hoc outline.
At the heart of the author's single sourcing approach is a concept called 'chunking' - grouping information into manageable chunks - and factors such as relevance and consistency. When these are employed the cost-effectiveness of the method becomes apparent for two reasons:
(1) Documents written by teams are consistent and developed using a set process.
(2) Components within the documents - blocks - can be reused in other documents because they will address a specific, relevant topic (a chunk).
What I like about this book is the fact that it makes Information MappingŪ available to anyone who will take the time to read this book and apply the principles. I also like way it offers an off-the-shelf solution to any company that wants to implement a cost-effective, highly efficient documentation standard that supports readable documentation that can be used instead of 'shelfware'.
The best way to learn about this book is to visit the official Information MappingŪ site (ASIN B0000B01VZ) upon which many of the principles in this book are based. What you will discover there will give you a reasonable idea about what to expect from the approach in this book. If you are a technical writer who works with software architecture I also recommend that you read "Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond" (ISBN 0201703726) because the approach in that book is consistent with both the "Single Sourcing" approach, as well as Information MappingŪ.
re: not what I expected review
Ament's book does not delve into the details of tools implementation. However, writing modular documentation that can be chunked and reused is a necessary prerequisite to single sourcing.It's a good idea to understand the stylistic and writing requirements before getting into tools. Ament's book should be used in conjunction with tool-specific information.
(9 reviews)
