Wednesday, November 22, 2017

The Inconsistency Drives Me NUTS!

Working at Pearson was a good time in my career, but I have zero desire to go back to Pearson. It was a time in my career when I improved my technical writing skills. It heightened my awareness of consistency in headings, which is why I think that is why seeing a table of contents like this irritates me:


The green boxes are general information headings, the red lines indicate that the gerund (-ing) is used in the heading while the purple lines indicate a non-gerund verb is used. And yes, I did not mark every instance of the above categories because I am inconsistent in things related to technical writing too!

I grew to love the way we decided to designate tasks in the PearsonAccess Next documentation, which, in part, looks like this:


I adore the way "Manage [Entity]" is used as the level 1 heading and that each level 2 heading under the level 1 heading is consistent. Each are tasks that the user can do within the software. Specifically, I remember suggesting "Manage" as the first word in each level 1 heading as a way to indicate that there are multiple tasks under the heading. When it came to naming some pages under the level 2 "Manage Students" heading, we used "Manage" again as there are multiple tasks on that page which were so closely related that having a third level didn't make sense. We also consciously decided we would not go to a third level heading, which was a standard until we got to the "Manage Online Tests" section. The tasks needed to be classified into "Before Online Testing" and "During Online Testing" to make sense. An early draft had "After Online Testing" as a heading, but eventually, that went away.


I enjoy working with RoboHelp to write disaster recovery documentation and have constructed my TOC with a keen awareness of consistency in the headings.

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