The editor and principal writer of Producing Quality Technical Information (1983) responds to the commentaries: answering questions about the sources of PQTI; discussing what the System Information group at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory were doing about usability from 1979 to 1983; comparing the predecessor nine "ease-of-use factors" with the seven "qualities" of PQTI and the nine "quality characteristics" of Prentice Hall's subsequent editions of PQTI, published under the title Developing Quality Technical Information; and revealing his own motives and thought processes in working on several usability initiatives in the laboratory at that time, including the publication of PQTI.
Producing Quality Technical Information played a major role in the shift from product-oriented information to user-oriented information. It brought to a large community of technical communicators an awareness of the role that technical information should play: not a description of a technical product or process but, rather, a description of what people need to do to use the product or perform the process. This shift in focus -- from product to user -- led to many changes in our profession and in our professional careers. No longer mere documentors of what others had done, we emerged as professionals who added value and usability to the project on which we worked.
Two complementary cognitive theories help to explain how novice technical communicators learn effective search methods: information foraging theory, a model of information-seeking behavior that combines human-computer interaction with anthropological constructs; and strategic planning theory, a communication model of how humans plan and achieve social goals. The paper includes an extended example of how a new technical communicator might learn to use both models on the job.
In this study I attempt (a) to specify a theory that explains the historical character of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, and (b) use that theory to cast light on a particular instance of change or transition in the production of written artifacts, that of the Web, principally, the issue of structured markup and discussions about precisely what a structured Web should look like, the work it should do, and so forth. What I attempt to identify, describe, and analyze, are the norms and conventions that govern the production of written discourse.
In a series of publications, Edmond Weiss describes the change in both programming and technical writing from an artistic craft to an engineering discipline. The change brought numerous benefits to the users and readers, to the programmers and writers, and to the companies they work for. In exchange for those benefits, Weiss says, writers had to give up control over the content and format of the documentation. They also lost the esthetic pride of creating a work of art and the personal satisfaction of teaching and protecting the reader. Weiss anticipates a future in which technical documentation is generated automatically and the technical documentor's job is merely to feed information databases. In the conclusion, I note a few differences of opinion, but overall I agree with Weiss's view.
