Content Reuse If You Use

Content reuse works well in an environment when it is written once and used whenever and wherever it can be used. Industry experts and specialist who are in favour of content reuse, speculate and visualize that it enhances consistency and usability with reduce costs to write and review contents.

The major benefit of content reuse is saving by reduced cost for producing contents. But how much would the content reuse work for your environment and how much would it reduce the cost, is what you need to decide while implementing the content reuse strategy. If you are looking to analyze how much you will save then you will also need to know how much it will cost. Simple way out is to assess the situation by simple calculation with cost consideration and forecasting the possible benefits.

In technical communication, the utmost priority is to serve your users and user satisfaction always impacts the documentation decisions. Practically, the goal of technical communication is to increase user satisfaction by improving content quality. But, sadly, it is difficult to measure the quality.

Following are some of the points, you can consider to measure if you want the content reuse strategy at place:

• Identifying tasks and time spent to complete them – Simple way would be to consider creation of 30 pages of technical documentation with hours spent on creation of a page, multiplied by the total number of the pages and an additional cost on review, editing and translation.

• Estimation of percentage of content reuse – Estimation by analyzing the document would give you an idea as to how much percentage of the contents you can reuse and how much you can save.

• Time require to analyze the content for reuse

• Time require to create your content specially for reuse

• Investment on Content Management System (CMS), authoring tools or file server to store the reusable content

• Training for authors on tools, technology and process for content reuse

However, if your reuse strategy improves content, reducing calls to support, then you can calculate savings. To be able to accurately quantify user satisfaction, you will need to link the reduced support calls to the improved documentation.

Technical Writers Training

The profession of technical writing is no more an isolated domain of west. The past decades have ushered the emerging numbers of technical writers in India too. To those who have not come across this profession or this opportunity, technical writing is the art and science of writing about the technical subjects to help end users of the technology.

Most often the requirement of becoming a technical writers demands advanced knowledge of English writing. In fact the good knowledge of English writing holds good to comprehend complex technical knowledge into simple English writing that helps user to understand the technology. But don’t get misguided that to be a technical writer you need to have prior experience of journalism or mass communication or a post graduate degree in English. If you have flare for writing in English and if you can write simple and crisp English, you are in the league. However, if you are transitioning from Journalism or have a post graduate degree in English, you will have an edge. Yet again, I would say that writing is more of an art than science and it can be anyone’s passion.

Today, the opportunity in the market requires you to be good in English. Many companies would prefer you to be on-board and train you in the technical writing on job. Most others would like to have a person who has some exposure of technical writing and knowledge of styles and tools of the trade.

The technical writing training offered by different institutes in different parts of the country exposes you on the knowledge of the following:

• Different style guides of technical writing
• User guide authoring and publishing tools
• Help authoring and editing tools
• Image editing and designing tools
• Classroom sessions on procedure and instruction writing
• A glimpse of different kinds of documents written by a technical writer
• The different technological domain in which technical writers are getting employed
• Creating a sample documents  

The training institutes are meant to teach technical writing and not English writing. You will be disappointed if you think that they can teach you technical writing without you knowing English writing. However, you can complement your average level of writing skills with the expert level of authoring tool knowledge which often required in trouble shooting and that makes you a production specialist.

If you have good skills of writing and preliminary knowledge of authoring tool, getting a job as a technical writer will not be tough. Today, almost all the industry driven by technology requires technical writers into their fold. Being a trained technical writer would greatly enhance your chances of getting a job.