Ah, Information Mapping.
When I lost a job interview because i didn’t have it, I got to wondering.
It’s a ‘method’ for technical writing. Allegedly it allows even non-writers to generate spiffy new documents within a proprietary template.
Well. Not really. What they’re selling, really, is research for presentation and a simple method for organizing the stuff you need to plop down on the page.
I think anyone who can write a college-level expository theme or research paper and got a B or higher already knows much of this stuff. I went through a couple of modified-for-the-company-I-was-consulting-at mini-courses. I was bored. But, then, I’ve been a professional writer since I was 18 ($5/story for the local newspaper).
For the non-writer, this might be valuable.
The most helpful part of Information Mapping is the very functional way the coursework helps you organize your material. Pros and English Teachers call this ‘organization’ or ‘outlining.’
Information Mapping calls it ‘chunking,’ a valuable technique for the frightened word smith.
The idea is to organize like with like elements until you reach a magic number (7). If you go over the magic number, you ‘re-chunk’ (reorganize) into smaller, bite sized pieces.
This is the meat of the course, and probably worth it if you are afraid of writing.
The problem is the templating. The organization spend dozens of dollars (OK, that was a joke) to ‘discover’ what the rest of us already knew:
- Labels and sub-headers: good
- Dense text: bad
- White space: good
But. The sub headers do not need to be 6.764536 inches from the left margin, nor do summary boxes have to be flush right. Yes, their templates are pleasing to the eye. But any designer or technical writer can design pleasing and easy to use templates in a half hour or so. And I’m sorry, I do not believe readers will tolerate incomplete sentences nor Washington Irving-style single paragraph sentences.
And any technical writer know two ignored rules of requirements gathering when executives will be part of the audience:
- If you find a color printer anywhere within 50 miles, use it.
- There has to be a pie chart in the requirement somewhere. It need not mean anything. I just has to be there.
Another great thing about Information Mapping is the realization that requirement documents have multiple audiences. Information Mapping explains how headers and sub-headers, labels, tables and formatting help your audiences navigate and skim your work. Nothing a good technical writer doesn’t already know:
- Make your labels mean something and actually describe what it’s labeling.
- Don’t add a graphic just to add a graphic- make sure you can explain why the graphic had to be there.
- Please, please, please, please use boldface, italic and underlining to an absolute minimum. It looses impact when every other line has some text enhancement.
- Limit yourself to two fonts in each document. Otherwise you look silly. One serif font, one san serif font. Use one of them for headers, captions, table data and labels. Use the other for body text.
- Consider us older folk and those with poor eye-sight. Them little serifs screw us up. Keep the body text to sans serif, please.
- Summaries- executive and section are always a great idea.
The courses get you up to speed fast and are of good quality. But your local community college is another option and a lot cheaper. All offer writing and many offer technical writing courses.
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