Program by Day
Program by Track
Program Titles
“Wiki Roundtripping? Structured Authoring? How Do They Co-Exist?”
24 Ways to Shut Down The Application and Other Apocryphal Stories
A Comparison of Three Visual Help Authoring Tools
Beyond L10N and G11N—Communicating with Everybody
Breathing Life into your Technical Documents using Adobe AIR and the Technical Communication Suite
Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
Changing the Rules of the Game for the Benefit of the User
Document Engineering in User Experience Design
Documentation Planning and Library Design in a Web 2.0 World
Extending the Value of Content in Enterprise Systems with Web Content Management
How an Author and Editor Used a Wiki to Write a Book
Living Multiple Lives: The New Technical Communicator
Making XML Technology Accessible
Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assisted Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse
Mapping the Entire Global Content Supply Chain
On the Road to Modular Training Content
Once Content is in XML. Now what?
Putting Everything Back Together Again
See Dynamic Publishing in Action!
Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level
The In.vision DITA Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Word and SharePoint
Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML and DITA
Understanding Component Content Management
Using Collaborative Tools for Virtual Team Management
Using Task Modeler to Streamline DITA Content Development
What Technical Communicators Need to Know about Flash
Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information
Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models
[Workshop] Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML
[Workshop] An Overview of RoboHelp 7
[Workshop] Content Engineering
[Workshop] DITA Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL
[Workshop] Introduction to XSL
[Workshop] Making DITA Work For Your Data
[Workshop] Simplified Technical English
[Workshop] Single Sourcing with the Technical Communication Suite
Session Details
[Workshop] Writing for Reuse: Learning How To Write Modular Content for Reuse
Speaker: Pamela KosturTime: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Date: May 9
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Pinnacle Ballroom 1
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 technical communication. Technical communicators are being called upon more and more 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!
