The Role of the Gatekeeper

July 28th, 2010 | Posted in blog 6 Comments »

Sarah O’Keefe’s guest post — The Role of the Gatekeeper is Changing — on Peg Mulligan’s blog is interesting. Sarah writes,

The Internet is removing the traditional gatekeepers for content.

This may seem obvious, but its implications in my life have been profound. I majored in English and then earned an MFA in creative writing. After graduating, I gathered up my best essays and sent them off to literary journals for publication. After months of waiting, I didn’t publish hardly anything. It was frustrating. They were good essays, but they didn’t have the right focus. That timeframe was about 1999 to 2002.

A few years later, I started blogging. First in an experimental, non-committal way. Then I started to gain more focus, and after a while, I realized that I could have as much satisfaction publishing online on my blog as I could in any print journal.

I realize Sarah’s comment was in the context of technical communication, but the principle is the same. Whatever you want to publish, you can. There are almost no restrictions on the Internet. Collaborative platforms empower even the most technically illiterate people.

Sarah writes,

There’s never enough time for in-house professionals to create all of the content that’s needed. Contributions from the user community can provide additional support and build on the official core content.

This statement is more relevant to me now more than ever. I was enthusiastic about a particular project at work, and two weeks into it, the budget dropped. I have to take my half-written help content to the community to help finish it off. And while I have volunteers, I realize that I need a solid collaborative platform with clear directions, easy tasks, and a lot of management and feedback to be successful with community efforts. All my previous efforts to involve community in writing documentation have mostly failed.

Sarah writes,

There is a temptation for business executives, especially in cash-poor start-ups, to dismiss their technical communication staff and simply rely on the community to provide documentation.

This trend always astounds me. Even in my organization, support for professional technical writers varies significantly from department to department. On some projects, the customer (in a specific business department) has a designated writer who handles the material. On other projects, we (the IT department) provide help. But it always frustrates me to see a project manager marginalize help and dismiss the technical writer’s role. In fact, I need to meet with a project manager tomorrow to try to talk sense into him.

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PJS says:

July 28, 2010 at 10:17 am

A recent post by James Mathewson, “How to Measure the Value of Editors,”
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2010/how-to-measure-the-value-of-editors/
Is particularly relevant to this issue. IBM conducted a study comparing the response to a marketing piece not reviewed by a professional editor to the same piece that had been edited. The study revealed a 30% greater response to the edited version. Good writing DOES matter.

The marketing piece that was unedited was written by a marketing professional, so it was decent to begin with. It seems obvious that the benefits of editing user or technical information posted by a non-writer would yield much greater benefits.

Tom Johnson says:

July 30, 2010 at 2:10 pm

Thanks for pointing me to the link. It was an interesting article. I still think editors are a dying role, though. Now every writer is an editor. We peer edit.

mike says:

July 31, 2010 at 3:27 pm

Editors are in a declining role currently, but the value that editors add has not changed, just been discounted. The idea that writers are adequate peer editors works under very specific circumstances, which starts with (and is limited to) writers who are good enough to essentially be editors themselves. Most writers aren’t close. In my world — software — this is like saying that programmers can QA each other’s work. Sure, there’s code review and buddy testing, but no serious software project does without people who are dedicated to testing/QA. Besides, if there’s never been enough time to create content in the first place, why use up an already scare resource (writing time) for an editorial job?

I have faced this attitude for all the time I’ve been an editor (5 years, with 20 years before that as a writer). Over and over I have made believers out of people by directly, one on one, showing them the value that editing can add to their work.

The manager whom you describe needs to undergo a similar conversion w/r/t writing. He or she makes the same assumption about writers that many do about editing — that the benefit is inconsequential enough to not spend resources on, and moreover argues that the community can fulfill this function. The only way the manager is going to believe differently is if he or she sees directly why dedicated writing resources provide a superior product. As I say, I have been able to show this for editing, but unlike you, I don’t see that outcome from peer editing.

All this said, I argue under the presumption that the people who are filling these roles are competent and can show that they add value. Sadly, this is not always the case, whether for writers OR editors.

Tom Johnson says:

July 31, 2010 at 7:29 pm

Mike, thanks for sharing your comment about the role of editors. I know editors add value, and I always welcome an editor’s perspective, but we don’t have a dedicated team editor, and I’ve found that most clients espouse the “good enough” theory towards writing. Neil Perlin has an article in a previous issue of Intercom (a few months ago, with the cover that says “Pushing Ourselves Out of the Corner”) that talks about writing that is “good enough.” My main experience with editors is that they over-emphasize style and wording at the expense of the core issues of content and accuracy. When you review the technical content, do you follow the steps to check the accuracy, or do you agonize over commas and “that” versus “which”?

July 31, 2010 at 9:25 pm

If the only value that your editors have been adding is copy-editing angst, you’re not getting good editing and/or folks are misunderstanding the role that an editor can play. Carolyn Rude has summarized it nicely: “Editors remain expert on grammar and mechanics, but they offer so much more: analysis, evaluation, imagination, and good judgment applied to information design and management.” (http://amzn.to/aAjjP2)

In my role, I work with my writers on every facet of the documentation process, from determining audience and message through doc-set (TOC) and document organization, selection of appropriate medium (how-to topic? video? blog entry?), technical content (right content? correct and complete?) to QAing docs on a live site and tracking and triaging customer feedback. In addition to all the usual — grammar, clarity, consistency, legal issues, suitability for localization, link checking, and all that “just editor” stuff.

My problem with peer editing (which I’ve participated in) is that a writer who worries about none of these things in his or her own work will not worry about them in other writers’ work either. To spot an ill-organized document requires that one grasp some fundamental concepts about doc organization, and as I say, all too often writers are not highly competent in these things. Present company, I assume, excepted. And needless to say, this is doubly true for people (programmers, program managers, etc) who are knocking off the occasional whitepaper or readme file but otherwise do not write in any sort of professional context. (Full disclosure: I do work with some programmers who can out-write anyone I know whose title actually says “writer.”)

I have certainly heard the sentiment, including among people at my company, that editors are not much more than an obstacle to getting things done. Having talked with some of these folks to find out where this comes from, I think I understand — they have, alas, worked with editors who do not in fact add much value beyond the sorts of things you list. Which are (that are? haha), admittedly, of little concern in the greater scheme of things. If that’s all I ever did as an editor, I could not in good conscience defend the profession.

Peg Mulligan says:

August 6, 2010 at 11:39 am

Hi Tom,

Thanks for mentioning my blog, and for your thoughts on Sarah’s provocative post, The Role of the Gatekeeper is changing.

I tremendously respect our editorial colleagues and have worn that hat myself, on occasion. As a writer, I value the feedback and almost always incorporate editorial suggestions, given in the spirit of improving my writing, or making it more consistent.

However, it’s entirely possible to have a well-written, consistent document that is inaccurate, incomplete, and just not usable.

When as a writer, I have on occasion been required to sacrifice time developing accurate or complete content, for incorporating “that” or “which”-type changes, I can’t help but think something’s wrong with the priorities and process.

I’ve long felt that most editorial feedback should be incorporated at the beginning of the next iteration, when the product’s feature development is underway again, and when writers traditionally have more time to focus on those mechanics.

I believe “the good enough” principle has and will continue to prevail, especially for one-time use instructions. As editors have been displaced in the process via this principle, so, too, shall we as technical writers, wherever it’s feasible, via user-generated content.

The question remains, as Sarah explored in her guest post—what types of content are professional writers still best suited-for, versus content that lends itself better to the user community? And as your post raises, will the user community step up well enough to provide sufficient user assistance?

I’d be really interested in learning about your experiences, where efforts to involve community in writing documentation have not been successful, and why.

Understanding and articulating those reasons, as well as the types of content that cannot be easily off-loaded to the user community, without an unacceptable cost in quality (accuracy, completeness, usability, etc.) is how technical writers position themselves for the future, in addition to marketing our natural knack at curating existing information.

Thanks again Tom, both for the blog mention, as well as your previous STC WordPress webinar, more than a year ago. Your session helped me a lot, when I first started blogging.

Peg

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