Typography is the study and process of typefaces; how to select, size, arrange, and use them in general. Traditionally, typography was the use of metal types with raised letterforms that were inked and then pressed onto paper. In modern terms, typography today also includes computer display and output.
#23611
Audience Analysis and Information Design: Creating a Needs Assessment Documentation Strategy 
A user needs assessment developed from extensive audience analysis can be used to develop a documentation strategy that effectively meets user needs. This paper provides an overview of the steps required to identify and analyze the various audiences critical to enterprise software documentation and create a needsassessment- based strategy.
Yeats, Dave and Paula Kozlowski. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>User Centered Design>Audience Analysis
#21406
Audience Analysis the Easy Way 
Audience analysis is more often a process of guesswork than of an in-depth inquiry into the mind and activities of the user. In fact, it is pretty easy to analyze your audience without having to do any research. Essentially, there are only two things that technical writers need ask themselves during the audience-analysis phase: what does the user know about the thing I am writing about? And what does the user want to know about the thing I am writing about?
Docsymmetry (2003). Articles>Rhetoric>Audience Analysis
#21576
Audience Analysis: Can You Get There From Here?
As writers we face many pitfalls. One of the most challenging is trying to meet multiple audience needs -- once we identify the audience. Rarely do we have the luxury of knowing the members of our audience personally and, even if we did, bringing them to consensus would consume all our time. As writers we often decide what the readers in our audience need before the readers have ever seen our material. The analogy of map readers can help us focus on our clients' needs.
Blagg, Lynn and Carolyn K. Johnson. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Rhetoric>Audience Analysis
#19961
Audience Analysis: Looking Beyond the Superficial
In performing an audience analysis, it’s easy to focus on simple, obvious issues such as the differences between men and women. In fact, men and women have more similarities than differences when it comes to most of the things that technical communicators document. A discussion of some seemingly obvious differences between men and women illustrates how to look beyond superficial issues to find the truly important differences.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Usability>Audience Analysis
#22116
Audience and Document Analysis
Before you begin editing a document, try to find out as much as you can about the audience for the document and purpose of the document.
Hollis Weber, Jean. Technical Editors Eyrie (2001). Articles>Writing>Audience Analysis>Rhetoric
#31078
By incorporating usability techniques--more commonly used in product design--writers can better understand their audiences and the ways they use (or have problems using) the content. Read on for tips on how to incorporate usability techniques into your work.
Stott, Susan. Intercom (2008). Articles>Writing>Usability>Audience Analysis
#28007
Audio Recording of Workshops and Seminars
The AHDS made audio recordings of recent seminars with the aim of transcribing the recordings, and presented them to seminar chairs to facilitate their task of completing reports on each event. This case study looks at some of the issues that occurred as the AHDS recorded and transcribed the material from these seminars. While its findings are based on roundtable seminars, some of them may also be of use to those doing other types of audio recording - interviews, field notes etc.
AHDS (2006). Articles>Collaboration>Multimedia>Audio
#23578
Austin's Technical Documentation Focus Group: An Industry/Academic Partnership In Action
Austin's Technical Documentation Focus Group represents an innovative collaboration between major area publications departments and academia. Designed to provide a networking forum on current publications, the group is managed by its one not-for-profit member, Austin Community College's Department of Technical Communication.
Dunlap, Johnny L., Deborah J. Rosenquist and Katherine E. Staples. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Collaboration>TC
#25194
Authentic Behavior in User Testing
Despite being an artificial situation, user testing generates realistic findings because people engage strongly with the tasks and suspend their disbelief.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Usability>Testing
#25654
Author-Friendly Electronic Submission to SGML-based Academic Journal
I and my co-workers developed an author-friendly method for electronic submission to an academic journal, which is published using a SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)-based system. The method uses a style function and RTF (rich text format), and can be used in popular word processing software: Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker, etc. The method has been adopted in Bulletin of Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ) since April 1994, which is the monthly English journal of CSJ, and has been published since 1937. The journal has been published in a SGML-based system since January 1993. Our electronic submission method will be included in SIST (Standards for Information of Science and Technology) No. 14 (draft): 'Guideline for electronic submission', which is considered in SIST Committee in Japan, and will be published in near future.
Ishizuka, Hidehiro. ISRDP in Digital Libraries (1997). Articles>Content Management>SGML
#23488
Authoring and Documentation Workflow Tools for Haitian Creole: A Minority Language
Although research has been conducted by several institutes on how to process written text for minority and vernacular languages, no academic research project thus far seems to have produced a usable, functional, authoring or translation tool for end-user native speakers of these types of languages. On the other hand, a set of software programs has been in the making for twenty years outside of academia.
Mason, Marilyn. TC-FORUM (2000). Articles>Language>Localization>Machine Translation
#24650
XML authoring is the latest mode of electronic communication of content. XML is about freedom: freeing the content, freeing the author.
Albing, Bill. KeyContent.org (2004). Articles>Writing>XML
#30388
Authoring for Electronic Delivery
Caterpillar is dramatically changing the way technical, product support information is authored. Book paradigms have been replaced by the more granular Information Element (IE) approach. The new integrated environment utilizes Unix based, TCP/IP connected, ECALS compliant tools on multi-tasking author workstations. Research data, in-process work approved IE's and relational indices are distributed to work group servers. Application software tools include a graphics editor and an interactive, context sensitive, SGML text editor. The environment is managed by a robust file management system that provides file tracking, revision control, workflow sensitive tool launching, burden planning and management reporting capabilities.
Hudson, Dave. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Online>Help
#25835
AuthorIT: Creating a 2-Column Glossary in Word
How to modify AuthorIT objects to get a 2-column glossary in the Word output.
Bracey, Rhonda. CyberText Consulting (2003). Articles>Word Processing>Style Sheets
#10348
Authority and Audience-Centered Writing Strategies: Sexism in 19th-century Sewing Machine Manuals 
This article examines audience-centered writing strategies in two very early sewing machine manuals and considers the interplay between such strategies and sexism in technical writing. It considers the difference between non-sexist and gender-neutral writing, and concludes that avoiding sexism in technical writing is difficult at best—and perhaps impossible—in any society that assigns work (and correspondingly, technologies) for use according to the gender of the user.
Durack, Katherine T. Technical Communication Online (1998). Articles>History>Documentation
#18951
This is an alternative/modified title page for a web of documents focused on the issue of authority and exists as the result of my decision to include this site on authority in hypertext as part of another project. This page exists for several reasons: the passage of time, the nature of the WWW, and the fact that the authority web exists. I will briefly discuss each of these reasons.
Clark, Dave, Roxanne Clemens, Christianna I. White and Mark Zachry. Iowa State University. Articles>Rhetoric>Theory
#10144
The Authority of Experience: Assessing the Use of Information Technology in the Classroom
It is a truism to say that the Internet has made many kinds of information more easily accessible to more people, but scholars in many fields are still trying to figure out how to deal with the consequences. Not only are professionals losing their monopoly over specialized knowledge, but the Internet also allows information to be distributed more widely and allows different kinds of information to flourish. On the Internet as a whole traditional forms of scientific knowledge are not privileged over individuals' reports of their own experience. Professionals often fight back against this trend.
Mack, Pamela E. and Gail Delicio. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2000). Articles>Education>Online
#10193
With the advent of powerful networked desktop computers and the World Wide Web, authors have for the first time acquired control of the technology for scholarly communication. That radical change prompts the question of how authors have in the past fared under copyright law, and how they might fare in the future. Anglo-American copyright law has always attempted to regulate the interests of three parties: the author, the publisher, and the public. Before there was a formal copyright law, royal patents granted to the Stationer's Company created printing monopolies and facilitated state censorship. The concerns of authors were hardly considered. The 1710 Statute of Anne, our first formal copyright law, left printers the dominant power in relations between printers and authors. What is most remarkable about the Statute of Anne is that the state's interest began to shift from censorship toward the creation of a public domain for intellectual property.
Bennett, Scott. Journal of Electronic Publishing (1999). Articles>Intellectual Property>Copyright>History
#30389
Authorship and Responsibility: The Problem of Special Knowledge
The ethical questions that technical communicators face frequently present themselves obliquely, arising because the communicators depend heavily upon the special knowledge of other people who provide necessary information. The special knowledge that communicators lack and others possess may come from highly technical education, privileged access to information sources, or socially constructed access to information. Proponents of need-to-know policies may argue that limiting communicators' knowledge absolves them of responsibility for the information's veracity and effects; however, more ethically rigorous considerations of the issue consider communicators' authorial roles, their right to know, and their responsibility to their audiences.
Bryan, John G. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>TC>Ethics
#18589
Authorship for Research Groups
Major clinical research investigations, especially large multicenter trials, require the involvement, cooperation, and dedication of many individuals. Roles and responsibilities range from conceiving the study and designing the protocol to collecting and analyzing the data, and numerous essential steps in between. Following completion of the study, the most important responsibilities are prompt preparation of a manuscript that reports the study findings, and timely submission of the paper to a journal for peer review, publication, and communication of the study findings to the scientific and clinical communities. The number of collaborative studies and multicenter clinical trials seems to be growing, with increasing numbers of published articles involving a study group. For instance, 22% of the 185 research articles published in JAMA as Original Contributions in 2001 specifically identified a study group, compared with 6% of 172 Original Contributions published 10 years earlier. Authorship of these studies increasingly involves some indication of group participation and responsibility, reflecting the cooperative nature, multidisciplinary teamwork, and complexity of such investigations.
Flanagin, Annette, Phil B. Fontanarosa and Catherine D. DeAngelis. JAMA (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Collaboration
#28890
Automated Current Awareness Service Using RSS Web Feed
Web feed is an automated web content syndication and surfing technique. It is a new eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based mechanism that influences and enhances library functions and services. This paper briefly discusses web feed creation using RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary (RSS) format, content syndication, and client software used to track and read the web feed contents. It also describes how libraries can use this technique to offer different Current Awareness Services (CAS)/Information Services libraries' to its subscribers.
P. Rajendiran and Indu Bhushan. International Journal for Technical Communication (2007). Articles>Information Design>Standards>RSS
#20814
Automated Email From Websites to Customers
Transactional email can be a website's customer service ambassador, but messages must first survive a ruthless selection process in the user's in-box. Differentiating your message from spam is thus the first duty of email design.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email
#24649
Automating Documentation Generation
The advent of automatic generation tools, that could automatically generate the information was a major step in the creation of more accurate documentation and it held the promise of saving time and money.
Albing, Bill. KeyContent.org (2004). Articles>Documentation
#28153
Automating Production with WebWorks AutoMap
WebWorks AutoMap is an extremely useful tool for performing unattended documentation builds. Out of the box, AutoMap can generate reasonable documents. By adding the power of scripting, the results can be amazing.
Bate, Simon. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Documentation>Software>Word Processing
#24089
Automating the Acquisition of Bilingual Terminology
As the acquisition problem of bilingual lists of terminological expressions is formidable, it is worthwhile to investigate methods to compile such lists as automatically as possible. In this paper we discuss experimental results for a number of methods, which operate on corpora of previously translated texts.
van der Eijk, Pim. Association for Computational Linguistics (1993). Articles>Language>Linguistics
