Chunking Content: Toward a Rhetoric of Objects  

We need to develop a rhetoric of objects to understand the new way in which we must create and deliver content over the Web. We are facing a new multiplicity of audiences—niche groups, and even individuals, to whom we offer customization and personalization. With our new tools and new ways of thinking about what we create, we are inventing informative objects that address the needs of our audiences, letting go of the concept of a document, as we plunge into a world of small chunks of content. In this presentation, I consider how this new approach to technical communication affects our ideas of audience, invention, arrangement, style, delivery, memory, and character—the canons of traditional rhetoric.

Price, Jonathan R. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Rhetoric

Complexity Theory as a Way of Understanding our Role in the World-Wide Web

Complexity theory offers a way of understanding our role within the World Wide Web. Postulating a rhetorical object based on object-oriented analysis and design, we can harness a number of ideas from complexity theory to gain a new perspective on the Web. This paper reviews a number of complexity ideas that may help technical communicators grapple with the exponential growth in the volume of inter-related and interacting rhetorical objects on the Web, viewing the rhetorical situation as the result of the law of increasing returns, which has brought us through a phase transition to a new environment, with its own emergent properties, creating new roles for writers, and new work for managers.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (1999). Articles>Information Design>Theory>Web Design

Complexity Theory as a Way of Understanding our Role in the World-Wide Web  

Complexity theory offers a way of understanding our role within the World-Wide Web. Postulating a rhetorical object based on object-oriented analysis and design, we can harness a number of ideas from complexity theory to gain a new perspective on the Web. This paper reviews a number of complexity ideas that may help technical communicators grapple with the exponential growth in the volume of inter-related and interacting rhetorical objects on the Web, viewing the rhetorical situation as the result of the law of increasing returns, which has brought us through a phase transition to a new environment, with its own emergent properties, creating new roles for writers, and new work for managers.

Price, Jonathan R. STC Proceedings (1998). Presentations>Web Design>Theory

The Dangers of Personalization

Personalization is coming to technical communication, and the results may not be pretty. n offering the individual an opportunity to pick and choose among XML content objects, we risk causing confusion when the organization of the site appears to shift, and familiar landmarks disappear. Critical content may become invisible to the user. The very process of creating preferences, custom options, or an entire personal profile adds a complex distraction that many users may resent, because it takes them away from their original task for so long that they forget what they were doing. Even advanced search mechanisms, which promise to pinpoint the exact information object the user wants, risk baffling users with their own complexity.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (2001). Presentations>Information Design>Personalization

Electronic Outlining as a Tool for Making Writing Visible

The electronic outlining software found in many commercial programs, when projected on the classroom wall, helps us train students in the main activities involved in creating an outline. Freed from paper, the electronic outline allows continuous revision, encourages multiple iterations of the many interdependent activities involved in research, planning, writing, and revision, and serves as a focal point for discussion of the ways in which the group is developing an ongoing consensus, as part of a larger conversation.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (1997). Articles>Education>Editing>Writing

An History of Outlining (and STOP)

The STOP teams brilliant practical approach to outlining also looks forward to a number of activities that have become more convenient thanks to electronic outlining software--collaborative work on organization, visual display of a verbal structure, an iterative process of research, outlining, and drafting focused on the same document, and the large organizations need for standard templates defining the structure of generic modules. In these ways, the STOP team are forerunners for practices that even today are avant garde.

Price, Jonathan R. DITA Users (1999). Articles>Information Design>Methods>History

Review: Mapping Websites: Digital Media Design  

When we are trying to envision the structure of a Web site, we may sketch diagrams on white boards, create outlines, fill whole walls with yellow stickies. Kahn and Lenk offer many sophisticated ways of visualizing your site. If you are planning a new site or reorganizing an existing site, this book provides an historical context for your information architecture, in-depth studies of complex sites, and a wide range of inspiring diagrams and site maps.

Price, Jonathan R. Technical Communication Online (2002). Articles>Reviews>Information Design>Web Design

Modeling Information in Electronic Space: An Introduction to This Special Issue    

Organizing content for delivery on the computer screen challenges us to design our information in an imagined three dimensions. As mobile devices respond to the surrounding world, our content also needs to adjust to the real physical environment around our user. Our rhetorical space has changed, and in this special issue, authors wrestle with the ways in which we think, move, and design differently as we explore these virtual and real worlds. One team suggests showing the user the structure of the information gradually in search forms. Another author suggests that merging object-oriented thinking with visual language may offer us a way to consider structure and format together, while granting each its own distinct qualities. Focusing on mobile devices, one author sketches out the challenges we face in this new rhetorical space, and another highlights the idea of embeddedness, the fact that our devices are enmeshed within a content-rich world that we move through. Our final contributor takes us to museums, to

Price, Jonathan R. Technical Communication Online (2001). Design>Information Design>User Interface>Web Design

A Rhetoric of Objects

The Web demands a new rhetoric for communicators, transforming traditional modern and classical ideas of audience, invention, arrangement, style, delivery, memory, and ethos. This paper sketches a rhetoric that analyzes customized, personalized object-oriented content, delivered in many formats and media, as part of a continuous conversation.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (2001). Presentations>Rhetoric>Personalization

So You Want to Freelance as a Webzine Writer?  

The Web offers a second universe for writers. Web publications have opened up just as the paper markets have shrunk for journalists, humorists, essayists, fictioneers, and yes, freelancing technical communicators. Webzines appear at a time when pay rates for magazine articles and books have begun to mirror the economy’s split into poor and rich, with fewer lucrative contracts in the middle. But now the opportunity exists for a writer to make a middle-class living on the Web.

Price, Jonathan R. STC Proceedings (1998). Careers>Freelance>Journalism>Writing

So You Want to Freelance as a Webzine Writer?

The Web offers a second universe for writers. Web publications have opened up just as the paper markets have shrunk for journalists, humorists, essayists, fictioneers, and yes, freelancing technical communicators. Webzines appear at a time when pay rates for magazine articles and books have begun to mirror the economy’s split into poor and rich, with fewer lucrative contracts in the middle. But now the opportunity exists for a writer to make a middle-class living on the Web.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (1998). Careers>Freelance>Writing

STOP: Light on the History of Outlining

In 1965, three people at Hughes Aircraft (now Raytheon) published a landmark report called Sequential Thematic Organization of Publications (STOP), How to Achieve Coherence in Proposals and Reports. Their recommendations led the aerospace industry, and many others, to adopt a storyboarding approach to the development of large, complicated proposals such as those for new airplanes or satellite systems. Their report summarizes a practical collaborative method that is still useful, but I am interested in the light their report throws on the history of outlining.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (1999). Articles>Writing

Structuring Complex Interactive Information

To improve the structure of complex information when it is to be presented electronically, technical communicators may turn to ideas taken from object-oriented programming, to clarify and revive the structure of the material in existing documents before mounting them online. But when an organization starts moving information onto the Web, technical communicators may go through a phase transition, as the system becomes so much more complex it exhibits emergent behaviors, and demands new attitudes, concepts, and work from the technical communicator.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (1997). Articles>Information Design>Multimedia

Structuring Help for Re-Use  

Many teams are still laboring to transform poorly organized manuals into online help. But the biggest cllallege you face going from paper to online is not interface, but structure The better your structure, the easier your users will navigate.

Price, Jonathan R. STC Proceedings (1995). Presentations>Documentation>Information Design

Review: Technical Style: Technical Writing in a Digital Age  

Haile argues that 'books on technical writing often ignore the problems writers face in presenting equations and the problems readers face in decoding them.' That's often true. And, just as Edward Tufte's books show a passion for truth in statistical charts, Haile's analyses and prescriptions demonstrate how much he cares about clearing away the clutter that stands between readers and the underlying science.

Price, Jonathan R. Technical Communication Online (2004). Articles>Reviews>Writing>Technical Writing

Tools for Creating and Managing Personalized Content

There are several ways to create content tagged correctly in XML, then several tools for managing that content. Here are some types of tools for creating content.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (2001). Resources>Directories>Personalization

Towards a Library of Technical Communication  

Technical communication needs its own library, to preserve our work, and to enable other writers, editors, managers, students, teachers, and researchers to study good and bad examples, analyze what works and what does not, and develop a real history of our churning field, in which many good ideas have surfaced, then been dropped, reinvented, turned around, and forgotten. We propose developing a prototype library, soliciting materials of every kind from technical communicators around the country, and opening an ongoing discussion of paths to take toward a resource we could all use.

Price, Jonathan R., Coulombe Leland and Elena Marshall. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>TC

Towards a Library of Technical Communication

Technical communication needs its own library, to preserve our work, and to enable other writers, editors, managers, students, teachers, and researchers to study good and bad examples, analyze what works and what does not, and develop a real history of our churning field, in which many good ideas have surfaced, then been dropped, reinvented, turned around, and forgotten. We propose developing a prototype library, soliciting materials of every kind from technical communicators around the country, and opening an ongoing discussion of paths to take toward a resource we could all use.

Price, Jonathan R., Coulombe Leland and Elena Marshall. Communication Circle, The (1998). Articles>TC

What Technical Writers Can Learn from Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language

In a series of books, Christopher Alexander, an urban planner and architect, has inspired object-oriented programmers with his idea of a pattern language-originally, a catalog of solutions to common problems faced by any community or individual creating a livable structure such as a town or a house. His approach might also help technical communicators polish and perfect our own standard rhetorical structures (such as the procedure, user guide, or reference), viewed as common ways of answering frequent, if virtual, questions from our users . Alexander's way of describing age-old patterns such as neighborhoods, streets, paths, and homes may give us a model for creating our own set of patterns in technical communication, whether or not we adopt some of the eager elaborations offered by folks in the object-oriented design world. What's a pattern? For Alexander, a pattern is a practical guide to resolving any problem that occurs over and over, such as how to lay out common ground for a town square, or punch a hole in a wall for a door.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (2001). Articles>Information Design>Rhetoric

You and Me: Making Technical Communication Personal  

Personalization lets us pinpoint our information for a particular person, small group, or niche audience. Using object-oriented databases and content management software, we are learning to answer individual questions, offer multiple menus leading to the same information, improve the precision of searches, respond individually to email and discussion questions, and allow users to customize the contents of their own personal manuals. In these areas, E-commerce and commercial information sites show technical communicators the way to customize information for each visitor.

Price, Jonathan R. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Web Design>Personalization

You and Me: Making Technical Communication Personal  

Personalization lets us pinpoint our information for a particular person, small group, or niche audience.

Price, Jonathan R. STC Proceedings (2001). Design>Web Design>Personalization

You and Me: Making Technical Communication Personal

Text of talk presented at the 48th International Conference of the Society for Technical Communication, Chicago, IL, May 2001. We are moving toward an audience of one. Beyond the great mass. Beyond niches, micromarkets, subgroups, demographic clusters. Communicating with one person at a time.

Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The. Presentations>Information Design>Personalization