Visual Media
Worth a Thousand Words
Often, an illustration will answer a customer's question better than a hundred pages of copy. As a technical writer, you will be working with visual images on a regular basis. Your manuals and online help will doubtless be full of drawings, diagrams, photos, and other visual elements. In general, you won't be expected to produce these images yourself, the Company will have an art department or an outsourced commercial art supplier, but you will often be making decisions about what kind of graphics support would best get your message across. As you study technical writing through the examples you find or your Company's prior offerings, note the ways visual supports are used. What styles of graphics appeal to you? Which ones offer the most information?
In addition to static images on a page, technical writers are increasingly making use of audio and audiovisual illustrations and supplemental materials of all kinds. Writers of training materials have found that video presentations and demonstrations can help users learn the features of their products far more quickly and easily than from a manual. Video can mean camera work with live actors, or it can involve computer animation, PowerPoint-style slide presentations, or screencasts, in which the viewer sees a movie of the use of a piece of software in action right on his screen.
Podcasting is another choice of a deliverable that has a potential for the technical writer. A podcast is essentially an audio or video blog post. Podcasts can be distributed through RSS feeds just like blogs can. While audio may not be a great mode of communication for hands-on training, it can be a way of talking to users about features of their products that they might not be using, of directing users to sources of support, and other informational content. Videocasts, on the other hand, can be a great aid in delivering technical and training information.
Wait, you might be thinking, I'm a writer. What's all this about video? True, you might not have the skills to shoot and produce a video yourself. But most videos start with a storyboard (a layout of the action sequence to be filmed or a plan for the editing process) and a script. And guess who writes the script for these videos? Technical writers, of course! While you may not be producing your own videos, as the technical writer (or in this case, the technical communicator) for your Company, you may well be in charge of a project that involves the production of video content. Even if you don't do it yourself, it pays to be aware of the advantages video can offer the technical writer in fulfilling their goal of ensuring usability for their company's products.
One more thought on the subject of deliverables. Do you think documentation always has to be serious? Maybe more people would use manuals and online help if they were more engaging and more approachable. Google must have thought so when they produced an online user's manual for their new browser software, Google Chrome. The manual is written in comic book format, featuring caricatures of the product's actual designers discussing the thinking that went into the project. Their manual is something different that has the potential to engage the audience in a way that a plain old manual never would. Check it out here and try thinking "outside the box" on your next documentation project.
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