Dictionaries starting to recognize Twitter terms?

In the past few weeks, several news reports have documented how some  mainstream dictionaries are monitoring Twitter terms, perhaps for future inclusion in their online and/or print publications. Does this mean that Twitter is morphing from ‘new shiny’ to ‘mainstream’? Or is it just part of the normal role of lexicographers who watch how language is being used? I guess only time will tell if Twitter is just another flash in the pan.

For example, “RT this: OUP Dictionary Team monitors Twitterer’s tweets” from the Oxford University Press USA blog (http://blog.oup.com/2009/06/oxford-twitter/ where they discuss some of their findings from monitoring close on 1.5 million Tweets since January 2009.

And Twitter has made it into the 2009 edition of the AP Stylebook: http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/pr_061109a.html

Aside: For a list of some of the abbreviations used on Twitter, see this Twitter FAQ from Brent Ozar: http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/08/twitter-101/

[Links last checked June 2009]

Classic t-shirt

The Venn Diagram on this t-shirt says all you need to know about ’social media’:

Where do you fit?

T-shirts are available for purchase from: http://site.despair.com/socialmediatee/

[Link last checked June 2009]

Remote user and user interface testing

Five Second Test

The Five Second Test site is in beta. They offer:

A simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.

So far, tests are free. You can submit images of your interface/web page or can participate as a tester. (The people behind this site are an Australian company too!)

Remote usability testing resources

Liz Bacon, a member of the STC Usability and User Experience Community, has put together a comprehensive Google spreadsheet of several remote testing offerings. She has summarized their features, costs, etc. here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pc-NAeDLmYFveCRlIejNuFA.

Liz says this about the spreadsheet she’s put together and shared:

On a high-level, there is the asynchronous, unmoderated, remote system, available for a wide range of prices. Then there is a more do-it-yourself synchronous, moderated, remote approach that’s essentially a screen-sharing and ideally recording solution, also available for a wide range of prices. Plus Morae is on the list, as a step towards a more complete overview of usability testing systems; Morae also plays well with UserVue.

I’d be glad for people to expand on this material, which is a publicly shared Google doc. I’ll update it as I get more information from a couple vendors, too.

Word: Keyboard shortcut to paste unformatted text

Copying text from one Word document to another can be problematic, especially if you’re using templates and styles. Things can go wrong. Text can take on the styles of the destination document/template or keep its  own styles. And sometimes you don’t want to keep any of the styles in the original text — you just want to paste in the text without any formatting.

Word has several ways you can achieve this, some more convoluted than others, but as far as I know, there’s no standard keyboard command to paste text in as unformatted text.

Some of the standard methods within Word 2003 and 2007 are:

• Paste the text and click the little icon at the bottom right of the pasted text, then select Keep Text only.  You have to do this immediately after pasting — as soon as you move away and do something else with the document, the icon option is gone.
• Select Edit > Paste > Paste Special > Unformatted Text from the menu (Word 2003) OR Home tab > Paste > Paste Special > Unformatted Text (Word 2007).

But what if you have LOTS of text to paste in as unformatted text? Well, you can set up a macro in your template (e.g. Normal.dot) and apply a keyboard command for it. Then, when you need to paste in a lot of text as unformatted text, you just press the keyboard combination and it’s done.

This macro is called NoFormatPaste:
Sub NoFormatPaste()
Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
End Sub

Add the macro to the Word template

To add the NoPasteFormat macro to your Word template:

1. Go to Tools > Macro > Macros (Word 2003) OR Developer tab > Macros (Word 2007).
   
2. In the Macro name field, type NoFormatPaste.
3. Select Normal.dot (or whatever template you want to add this macro to) from the Macros in drop-down list.
4. Click Create.
5. Paste the Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText line from the macro above AFTER the last ‘ and BEFORE the End Sub line.
6. Close the Microsoft Visual Basic window.

Macro for pasting unformatted text

Assign a keyboard shortcut to the macro

Once you’ve added the macro to your template, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Here’s how:

1. Go to Tools > Customize (Word 2003) OR Office button > Word Options > Customize (Word 2007).
2. Click Keyboard (Word 2003) OR Customize (Word 2007).
3. On the Customize Keyboard dialog box, select Macros from the Categories list.
4. Select NoFormatPaste from the list of macros on the right.
5. Click in the Press new shortcut key field.
6. Press the keys you want to assign to this function (in the example, I’ve used Alt+Z).
7. Select the document or template where you want this function to apply (in the example, it’s the Normal.dot template).
8. Click Assign.
9. Click Close to close the Customize Keyboard dialog box.
10. Close the Customize dialog box (Word 2003) OR the Word Options dialog (Word 2007).

Assign a keyboard shortcut for the macro

Test your keyboard shortcut

1. Open a new document based on the template you selected in step 7 above.
2. Open an existing Word document with text you want to copy and paste into the new document.
3. Copy the text from the existing document.
4. Go to the new document and press Alt+Z (or the keystroke combination you assigned in step 6 above). The copied text should paste in as unformatted text.

(Thanks to David G for helping me with this)

Presentation: Reviewing Screen-based Content

In 2006, I delivered this presentation to the annual AODC Conference in Cairns, and to the annual ASTC (NSW) Conference in Sydney later that year.

There are two sets of slides: the first set contains the presentation, the second set contains the examples I used.

All accompanying handouts, resource lists etc. are available from the CyberText website.

The focus of this presentation was:

• what to look for when checking a website, a CHM, and an animated tutorial or demonstration
• how to capture screen-based content in a form suitable for printing (for hand mark-up) or electronic delivery (for screen mark-up)
• which software tools can help automate the reviewing process

This presentation does not cover general text editing, such as writing style, punctuation, etc.

[Links last checked April 2009]

Don’t make the next step difficult

I got a replacement wireless access point a few weeks back. And like a good citizen, I tried to register my purchase on the Netgear website.

The screen shot below is part of their product registration page (there’s another section to the right that I didn’t capture, which is for Returning users with existing login details):

Netgear's product registration page

So, what’s wrong with this, you might ask? In summary, neither the process nor the ‘call to action’ are clear. Specifically:

• The Registration button in the navigation bar returns you to this page.
• The Activate your support contract(s) link returns you to this page. Huh?
• The Continue button. What Continue button? Yep, it’s hard to see but it’s below the text in the same font size and color as the body text. The background color is so faint that on certain monitors in certain light conditions this button is almost impossible to see. In fact, I refreshed this page, clicked all the other options (some even twice) before I even saw it! When I clicked on it I was taken to page 1 of 4 for registering my product (more on that in a moment…).

A new user to this site is likely to give up because just starting the registration process is difficult to do. By the way, why does it takes FOUR pages plus this front page to register a Netgear product? It’s not a bank loan! No wonder people don’t register — they’d get turned off even if they found and clicked the Continue button.

So how can this process be improved? Luke Wroblewski, in his session at the 2009 WritersUA Conference, gave many guidelines, of which two in particular are relevant to this initial page:

• Show progress towards completion. [Netgear did this on the four registration pages, but there was nothing on the initial page that helped.]
• Commands: Not all form actions are equal. Reset, Cancel, Go Back rarely need to be used, so can be omitted or relegated to lesser importance using faded color, smaller size, etc. Primary actions directly responsible for form submission include Submit, Continue, Next, Save etc. Make these larger or a brighter color to emphasize their importance, and align such that they are part of the clear path to completion.

Just making the Continue button larger, with a different (brighter) background color, and different font size to the rest of the page would’ve helped — a lot.

To restate my mantra — courtesy of Steve Krug: “Don’t make me think!”

[Links last checked June 2009]

Documenting a live user interface

Bill Swallow, the TechCommDood and an all-round nice guy, made this comment on Twitter a week or two ago:

Trying to document a UI that’s in live development is like trying to repair a moving car or building a sandcastle at the water’s edge.

Hear, hear!

Content types: Metadata for content

If you’re thinking of moving toward structured authoring, DITA, or other similar methodologies, you’ll need to get your head around content types.

The Content Strategy Noob has posted a very readable and understandable article called “Content Typology: Getting a Handle on your Content Types“, which should help!

[Link last checked May 2009]

Word: Change date format from Excel data

When you’re using an Excel spreadsheet for mail merge data in Word, any dates come in in the ‘native’ Excel date format even if you’ve changed the date format for the relevant cells in Excel. From what I can gather the ‘native’ Excel date format is m/dd/yyyy (e.g. 9/30/2009 for September 30, 2009).

If you want the date in the mail merged document to be displayed differently, e.g. dd MMMM yyyy (30 September 2009), then you have to add a switch to the mail merge field.

Here’s how you do it in Word 2003 (Word 2007 is probably the same, though I haven’t tested it):

1. Insert the mail merge field for the date into the Word document as normal. It will look something like this (where StartDate is the name of the mail merge field in this example):
   
2. Right-click on the mail merge field, and select Toggle Field Codes.
   
3. Put your cursor after “StartDate” and before the closing } and add a space.
4. Type in the switch: \@ “dd MMMM yyyy”
   
5. Right-click on the mail merge field again, and select Toggle Field Codes.
6. Save the document. The next time you run a mail merge, the date will be in the format you entered at Step 4.

This example shows just one date format switch — experiment with other combinations to get the date format you want. For example, “MMMM dd, yyyy” for September 30, 2009; “dd-mm-yy” for 30-9-09, etc.

Offshoring, outsourcing and globalization

A week or so ago someone on one of my STC technical writing email discussion lists posted this:

I hear that tech writing pundits and trend watchers are predicting the eventual demise of the tech comms field due to globalization. A few good years left then – kaput. We will all be out of business due to competition from offshore. Best to move into a line of work that can produce a profit for employers (unlike tech comm) AND requires an onshore presence, i.e., can’t be done remotely from thousands of miles away.

After I’d settled down a bit (!), I responded as follows:

As an international member of STC, I won’t write what I felt when I read this, so here’s the polite version:

• What do you class as ‘offshore’? Everybody lives somewhere and any country/continent where they don’t live can be classed as offshore — from their perspective.
• If ‘onshore’ means the US or perhaps North America (US + Canada), then you have forgotten that STC is an international organisation. Therefore many members do NOT live in the US/Canada. With attitudes like those you expressed, it’s no surprise that many former international members of STC left the organisation, and continue to leave it.
• My ‘onshore’ is Australia. If I send work to the US (as I have done several times), then that’s ‘offshore’ for me. A US citizen gets the work and gets paid. What’s wrong with that? If you see nothing wrong with that, then why do you think it’s wrong when it’s the other way round? (and yes, I’ve done work for companies in the US and Israel) Should I, as an Australian, only ever send work to other Australians? Should I assume that someone from outside Australia can’t do the work? (Now substitute another country’s name in the last two questions and see if you get the same answers!)
• If you think it’s OK for me (as an Australian) to do work for US companies, then which countries are you referring to when you talk about ‘competition from offshore’? Are some countries ‘better’ than others? Are some countries acceptable, but others not? Which countries? Why?
• ‘Thousands of miles away’ can mean within country. The US is a vast place, as is Canada, Australia, etc. I work remotely with ALL my clients, whether in my home state (3 hours to my capital city), within my own country (min. 3 hour flight to my nearest state), or on the other side of the world. I am always at least hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from my clients. It has not been an issue.

A blog post earlier this week from Your Writing Dept in Sacramento — titled Outsourcing vs. offshoring, and how U.S.-based technical writers can stay competitive — adds a slightly different perspective, as well as explaining very well the differences between outsourcing (which is what I do all the time) and offshoring (which is what I do some of the time).

My only beef with this well-written article from Your Writing Dept was the title — despite the reasoned arguments, the good advice, and the excellent final paragraph, the title had a very US-centric feel to it. Which I guess is OK as the writer is based in the US ;-)