Program by Day
Program by Track
Program Titles
A Comparison of Three Visual Help Authoring Tools
A Practical Guide to Capturing, Organizing, and Securing Your Documents
Being Smart About Global vs. Local During Clinical Trials
Bringing User Experience to Medical Devices
Centralized Translation Processes
Changes to Labeling Requirements for Pharmaceutical and Medical Equipment Professionals
Creating and Serving Relevant Content
Creativity or Confusion Factor?
Developing a Collaborative Team
Developing a Unified Enterprise Content Model
Drowning in a Sea of Information… What’s Your Rescue Plan?
Globalization Issues with Medical Device Embedded Systems
Handling DITA Topics and Translation in a Regulated Industry
How to Enforce Standards in Life Sciences Documentation
How to Maximize Content for a Global Audience
How To Select and Procure Content Technologies
Marketing in a Connected World
Migrating to Structured Authoring on Your Way To XML
Phase 2 - What’s Next for Life Sciences and Enterprise Content Management
Preparing Compliant eCTD Submissions
Structured Content Beyond the Label
Structured Product Labeling Workshop
The Best Global Medical and Pharmaceutical Web Sites (and Why)
Transforming Technology Transfer and Recipe Management
Unlocking Handwritten Information from Medical Records
What’s New in Collaboration Tools
Writing Reusable Content for Different Audiences
XML-Based Collaboration with Office 2007
Your Global Audience is Already Here
[Case Study] Physician, Know Thy User
[Workshop] Analyzing Your Deliverables
[Workshop] Content Modeling for Life Sciences Content
[Workshop] Creating High Quality Content that Communicates Across Language Barriers
[Workshop] Do you Know Adobe Acrobat?
[Workshop] Games To Explain Human Capability and Limitations
[Workshop] Learning DITA From Concept to Implementation
[Workshop] Product Life Cycles in the Life Sciences Industry
Session Details
[Workshop] Writing Reusable Content
Speaker: Pamela KosturTime: 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Date: June 23
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Writing modular content that can easily be reused is important not only when working in a content management environment, but also in the world of “everyday” communication. Technical, medical, science and marketing communicators are being called upon increasingly to create reusable content and to reuse content that others produce. There are several good reasons to adopt writing for reuse, among them:
- Writing for reuse is efficient—It’s costly for several people to create the same product description (or procedure or error message) over and over again. Instead, one person can create it for all uses, based on a standard that accommodates all uses.
- Writing for reuse helps to ensure consistency—When the same product description is used for the manual, the online help, and the brochure, you can rest assured it is consistent.
- Writing for reuse helps to make content more usable—When writing for reuse, it’s critical that you follow standards, which are based on usability. Standards ensure that similar types of content are structured in similar ways. Everyone writing a product description follows the standard for the product description, making it both reusable and usable.
- Writing for reuse helps users to navigate through content—Reusable content is written in modules with clearly defined labels identifying the content’s purpose. Modules can be arranged to accommodate different users and users; the modularity can also help users to easily identify and select the information they need.
Writing for reuse is efficient for you, for the company you work for, and for your users. However, writing for reuse is different than “starting from scratch” or from writing a in the narrative form that many of us have learned and followed for several years. This workshop will convince you of the importance of writing for reuse and show you how to do it!
