tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Professionelles Schreiben / Technical Authoring
approaches have dramatically changed to cope with these shorter cycles,
and other demands provide pressure from every avenue. These
pressures show no sign of abating, as technological change flows
through nearly every manufacturing, design and service industry.
Structured Authoring is Different
Structured authoring is different from traditional style-based, linear
authoring in two key ways:
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the need for separation of content and form (the author is not concerned
with presentational form during the writing process)
−−
the modular architecture (documents are written as re-usable components,
with topics being the basic building blocks).
These two key differences have significant impact on writing approaches.
In the respected “Chicago Manual of Style”, first published in 1906,
70% of the guidelines concern presentational form. In DITA authoring,
presentational form is applied automatically at the publishing stage, and
is derived from the semantic mark-up applied during authoring. A DITA
style guide therefore needs to address the best practices for semantic
mark-up, rather than the best practices for presentational mark-up.
The topic-based modular document architecture is less of a change for
technical communicators who have previously worked with hypertext
documents, which are also topic-based. Even so, the re-use and modularity
principles within DITA require changes in mindset, and having
documented best practices makes the transition easier.
The Need for a Style Guide
For the benefits of a DITA approach to be realised, technical communicators
need to be producing high quality documents suitable for re-use
and modularisation, and this means that not only must the DITA standard
be adhered to, but common practices must be applied. One of the
difficulties of DITA adoption is working without a relevant Style Manual.
Traditional style manuals, with their focus on presentational style, are
entirely unsuitable for semantic authoring.
What goes in a DITA Style Guide?
A general purpose DITA style guide should contain supra-organisational
semantic mark-up rules; rules that can be followed by writers
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tekom-Jahrestagung 2012