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Regarding _Developing Quality Technical Information_ by Gretchen
Hargis (ISBN 0-13-790320-0), I have had several inquiries.
I highly recommend this 'Handbook for writers and editors' (as it is
sub-titled) put together by a technical editing group at IBM's Santa
Teresa laboratory. It is concise and yet full of practical examples.
Regarding 'real' and 'artificial' tasks, the book describes a real
task as a task users want to perform, whether or not they are using
your product to do it. Artificial tasks are tasks that are imposed by
the product.
The book provides the following examples of real and artificial tasks.
1. Users want to edit a table, but the writer introduces this task as
'using the table editor' instead of 'editing a table'.
2. Users want to count the records in a file, but the writer introduces
the task as 'using the CNTREC utility' instead of 'Counting records
with the CNTREC utility.'
"Users want," Hargis writes, "information about how to perform real
tasks, not a list of the buttons and controls in the product."
I can provide another example from an editing project in front of me
today: a help topic labeled
Using <product name> startup parameters
I want this changed to
Changing <product name> start-up behavior
or something similar. "Using parameters" is an artificial task.
Who "uses" parameters? (Actually, it's the software that
"uses parameters," isn't it?)
This has relevance to headings and index entries as well. A user
scanning the table of contents or index is much more likely to
make sense out of "Counting records" than "using the CNTREC
utility" -- except, of course, in the case of experienced users looking
for context-specific information because they already know something
about the utility (and those readers will recognize either heading).
Hargis also cautions against misleading users by using pseudo-task
headings. Pseudo-task headings start with vague verbs, such as
"understanding" and "learning" and sometimes (as above) "using."
Here's a test. Next time you see a topic with a name like
"Understanding the Interface," see whether it actually contains
procedural steps for how to "understand", or whether it is just
a description of the interface. If the latter, a more accurate heading
is simply "The Interface".
Good headings produce a good table of contents, from which users
can accurately predict what they will find in each section, and which
do not require any specialized knowledge of the product to recognize.
*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
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A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
three and a half days of immersion in the state of the art:
IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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