Writing Lesson: Using Jargon

What is jargon?

• Terminology specific to an industry or discipline that is unfamiliar to novices.

Why is jargon often inappropriate for technical documents?

• Jargon intimidates and frustrates readers.
• Jargon wastes reader's time.
• Use of jargon may indicate the writer's ignorance of the audience.

When is jargon appropriate for technical documents?

• Audience knows the jargon from experience.
• Audience has been trained on the jargon.

When appropriate, replace technical jargon with familiar words.

Jargon
Purchase Order is an eight-position alphanumeric entry field.
Familiar
Enter up to eight numbers or letters in the Purchase Order field.

Jargon
Input "MM" (M+PM specific) in the application code field of the main menu and depress the "enter" key.
Familiar
Type MM in the Application Code field of the Main Menu, and press Enter.

Question: When is it appropriate to use the term "field," which is clearly computer jargon?
Answer: When the writer knows that the user has been trained in basic computer terminology

Do You Wiki?

Wikipedia advertises itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. The idea is that anyone who knows, or thinks they know, about any topic can add their "knowledge" to the Wikipedia encyclopedia by writing an article on the topic. Anyone else can edit the original article to correct errors or add information.

Obviously, because of the potential for error in the short term, you might not want to use a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source, but it would be extremely helpful for background information and pointers to more authoritative sources. Over the long term, an article can become quite accurate and deep because of the multiple sources and self-correcting nature of this "free marketplace" of ideas.

Because humans are very creative and individual experience is so diverse, individuals may have off-the-wall knowledge or applications of knowledge that no one else has, no matter how expert in the field. The Wikipedia can capture this information.

Some corporation are beginning to use wiki technology to capture group knowledge and experience. For example Intel hosts Intelpedia, edited by Josh Bancroft, that is an online, freely-editable enclopedia of terms that are specific to Intel.

How do blogs and wikis compare--both are "democratic" communication tools slowly being adopted by corporations? Blogs are mostly individual expressions with comments by others; whereas, wikis are the soul of collaboration, where credit for who contributed what is less important than the increase of knowledge.

Below are a couple of good articles that explore various aspects of wikis, including wiki technology now publicly available on the Web.

Collaborative Content: How To Make Wiki Content Truly Democratic And Authoritative?. The recent Wikimania conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts fell on the heels of comedian Stephen Colbert's revealing how easy it is to twist Wikipedia content to one's own liking. Photo credit: Bjorn de Leeuw - remixed by Robin Good In spite of Wikipedia's editors correcting his gibberish quickly and effectively, the question of how to get Wiki content to be both democratic and authoritative is not being addressed very effectively yet by Wiki proponents. The enormous potential for collaborative content will go largely unrealized until more effective systems are put in place that recognize how hard it is to defend a democratic publishing institutions from the tyrannies of both the mobs and the authorities.... [Robin Good's Latest News]

The Gilbane Report: Volume 12, Number 10
Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?March 2005
http://gilbane.com/gilbane_report.pl/104/Blogs__Wikis_
Technologies_for_
Enterprise_Applications.html

"...being dismissive of blogs and wikis because of how they are most often used, and talked about, today is a mistake (PCs and web browsers weren’t considered as serious enterprise tools at first either). What is important is how they could be used. They are simply tools, and many of you will be surprised to find how much they are already being utilized in business environments. For this issue, Contributor Lauren Wood provides a straightforward explanation of what they are, describes how they compare with content management systems, and reports on some telling examples of how blogs and wikis are currently being successfully used in enterprises.
See the results of our short survey on enterprise use of blog and wiki technology. More....

David Orr

Business Priorities for Training

TrainingOutsourcing.com regularly conducts polls among its membership, who are training professionals working within businesses or who work as consultants to businesses. One of the questions asked was:

What is the most important metric that your learning organization could contribute to positively impact business performance?

As you can see from the data summaries below, the number one answer was consistently Increase Customer Satisfaction. It would be interesting to use these same metrics to see how individual training programs actually affect business performance. Another challenge is figuring out exactly how to measure whether the training affected these metrics, or whether other factors made the difference.

A common standard for measurement of training success is the four levels approach originated by Donald Kirkpatrick in the late Fifties. He identified the following levels:

Level 1 - Participant "smile sheets." These are the evaluation forms we all fill out immediately after taking formal, classroom training. These evaluations contain various questions about the suitability, completeness, and usefulness of the training materials. We are also asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the instructor. Level 1 is useful for spotting glaring issues about the training or instructor. Level 1 evaluations, however, are pretty subjective, often skewed by the evaluator's liking or disliking the instructor, which may be for various personal, stylistic, political or petty reasons. Almost all training has some forms of Level 1 evaluation.

Level 2 - Learning. Did learning take place? This level is measured by various exercises and tests administered during or immediately after training. The advantage of this method is that trainees have to demonstrate that they have met the learning objectives. The shortcoming of this method is in not measuring how well the training translates to the actual job. Most training has some degree of Level 2 evaluation.

Level 3 - Performance. Do the trainees perform better on the job than before training? To be objective some sort of performance measurement has to be taken before the training and afterwards. In practice, this measurements is often taken by asking supervisors whether trainees perform better after training. This supervisor approach is not very accurate. Few businesses attempt to measure increases in productivity because of training.

Level 4 - Impact on Business. Did the training have a measurable impact on various business metrics? This measurement really answers the question, "Was the right training given?" For example, you could have training that passed Levels 1, 2, and 3 with flying colors but turned out to have no effect or negative effect on business metrics. How could that happen? Well, maybe the organization successfully trains sales people to sell better, when what they need is better customer service for existing customers. Selling more merely exacerbates customer service issues.

The difficulty with Level 4 evaluation is always, "Can meaningful measurements be taken that clearly link the results to the training?" If you look at metrics in the the data summaries below, can you imagine more than one factor that could affect each of these metrics? Probably so. The difficulty of implementation makes Level 4 the least used of the evaluation methods.

However, Level 4 is also the most powerful way of evaluating, and I would argue, clearly the one most worth doing. The trick is causal linkage of metrics to the training. For example, my company once did training for a call center, which had experienced many orders bounced for technical reasons. Before the training we interviewed managers and top performing workers to see what metric they thought would be most impacted by successful training. They all indicated "fewer bounced orders for technical reasons." So, causation was highly indicated. After the training, bounced orders diminished by 1/3, so the program was deemed successful.

No matter what level of evaluation a company chooses, some evaluation needs to happen; otherwise, the training dollars may be completely wasted and no one would know. David Orr

Data Summaries:

Business IT :

Reduce time to productivity
18.52%
Increase top line revenue
18.52%
Decrease expenses
11.11%
Increase customer satisfaction
20.37%
Increase profit
11.11%
Increase customer retention
9.26%
Decrease error rates
11.11%

Healthcare & Medical

Reduce time to productivity
13.33%
Increase top line revenue
15.56%
Decrease expenses
13.33%
Increase customer satisfaction
20%
Increase profit
13.33%
Increase customer retention
11.11%
Decrease error rates
13.33%

Business Strategy and Outsourcing Learning Community

Reduce time to productivity
17.29%
Increase top line revenue
12.78%
Decrease expenses
13.53%
Increase customer satisfaction
19.55%
Increase profit
14.29%
Increase customer retention
12.78%
Decrease error rates
9.77%

I Hate You! Oops, Maybe It’s Someone Else.

In an earlier article I wrote about psychological projection in business. See http://tipsbuscom.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-hate-you-psychological-projection-in.html. The article explains psychological projection (PP) this way: ”PP occurs when a person is operating in a social setting and unconsciously overlays some internal phenomenon on an external situation or person. The person then reacts to the internal overlay instead of to the external reality. To an outsider or to one on whom the PP has been overlayed, the person's actions and responses seem inappropriate to the real situation.”

But how do I know when I am projecting? Here’s a short set of indicators and questions:
1. Are my feelings about the person unusually intense, given the subject matter or situation?
2. Do I have trouble even looking at the person, or feel intense anger, depression, impotence or even hatred when I do look at the person?
3. Does this situation remind me of other difficult and frustrating situations that seem to recur in my life?
4. Do I think the other person is evil or has evil motivations?
5. Does the person or situation remind me of someone or something from my immediate family in childhood? For example, a manager is overbearing and so was my father.
6. Is this situation clearly like one in which I have failed before? Is this person clearly like one I have had difficulty with before?
7. Do I distrust someone without a good reason why I should—for example, a prior betrayal?

OK, so I suspect there may be PP going on. What can I do about it? I can use my imagination. How? Remember, a PP is an overlay, so I can use my imagination to remove the overlay.

Next time I feel the fear, anger or other strong emotions attached to a person, I can identify who in my past they remind me of—hint, it’s usually someone in my immediate childhood family. I can imagine their face and feel the fear, anger, sense of impotence, hatred or other feeling I experienced in dealing with them.

Now, holding that image of their face, I can imagine the face of the person I’m currently dealing with. If I move, in my imagination, the face of the family member over the face of the current person, then take it off, I may experience a strange phenomenon—the strong emotion follows the face of my relative (the overlay). When I remove it from the current person, they don’t seem so formidable, evil, or whatever I imagined them. I can clearly feel the overlay.

Now, next time I see the current person, I can also imagine the overlay out beside them. I can see the difference and deal with the real person without the overlay. Dealing with a real person without overlays is much easier! David Orr

Writing Lesson: Negatives in Sentences

What is negative language?

• The action is phrased as what not to do
• Usually includes forms of no or not

Why is it inappropriate for technical documents?

• It tells users what not to do instead of what to do.
• Adds extra words
• Confuses users

Solution: Replace negative with positive wording

Negative:
The system administrator should not fail to update the system every three months.
Positive :
The system administrator must update the system every three months.
Negative:
If you do not enter the Purchase Order Number, you cannot move to the next screen.
Positive:
To move to the next screen, enter the purchase order number.

David Orr

Prospecting

Prospecting is a form of business communication that attempts to deliver a marketing message to a receptive person by going through many non-receptive people to find the receptive ones. Business people try to narrow the field of people to those likely to be receptive by purchasing mailing lists or joining networking groups of people professing to share similar interests. Another hidden power of prospecting is the principle of the six degree of separation, sometimes called the small world hypothesis.

What is?Com has a brief history of the six degrees concept. "Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called 'Chains.' " Continued.... http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci932596_
top1,00.html

Prospecting is, thus, a very hopeful endeavor. If we can frame an attractive message (package) and ask everyone we know to deliver it to someone they know who meets a certain criteria (like needing a certain type of service), chances are the message might get to a receptive person. This approach is what powers the most effective way of getting a new job--tell all your friends you are looking for work. Salespeople use the concept in every industry. Yet many new businesspeople act as if the law of averages doesn't work and neglect the six degrees principle.
David Orr