Rule No. 3- Putting two spaces after a period is a no-no.

In olden times, when typewriters are thingamajigs for writers, two spaces after a period was rule to indicate end of a sentence.

With onset of technology, fonts have characters of their own, with different widths, that putting two spaces after a period is no longer needed. Sometimes, this rule can create a rather annoying flaw that creates a stop rather than help you pinpoint end of every sentence.

Rule No. 4- DO NOT use all capital letters.

One designer said that when using all capitals in text, there are no ascenders or descenders. The two are what makes it easy to identify shape of a word. "The shape of almost every word becomes a rectangle, and it's harder to read."

But this doesn't also mean that you cannot use capital letters. Where can you use capital letters? Short phrases or headings do look attractive in all caps. Sans serif also works better in all caps.

Rule No. 5- DO NOT center large quantities of text.

The eyes go from left to right when reading. It's way to go. It rapidly scans one line, then goes from right side of page back to left side of page. When text is centered, it makes it harder for eyes to be told to find where next text begins again on left side of page, and makes it easy for reader to skip down lines of text.

This time, it's not too easy to bend rules. The best way is still to save centering to headings that don't run more than several lines deep.

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Managing change

It’s important that you minimise impact of changes to product and/or development schedule. To do this, you need to develop a technique which:

1.Identifies change 2.Estimates impact in time and/or resources * 3.Informs project manager

* You can use same estimating techniques as you used earlier in project.

Tracking writing progress

It is important to note that writing stage is not simply about writing. If you track your progress at every step along way, you’ll be able to see whether you will meet your milestones and deadlines, and you’ll also be able to use this project as a learning experience… to better plan next one. (You should ensure that all project records are easily accessible for ongoing maintenance and future project reference.)

You should track time taken to perform every step outlined in this procedure as well as each draft stage, review times, total turnaround times, etc.

Conducting regular team meetings

In order to keep all team members informed of writing progress, you should conduct regular team meetings. These meetings should be a forum for taking a look at your tracking metrics and discussing estimated percentage complete for various topics currently under way. If estimated percentage complete is lower than it should be given time already spent, then you can act on it. These meetings allow you to identify hitches in writing progress.

Writing progress reports

Your management also need to be kept informed of status of project. You should write periodic progress reports outlining:

•Where project is at •What you’ve done over last month •What you plan to do over next month •Any issues you’ve encountered Manage Production

The meaning of “production” varies depending on what kind of documentation you’re working on and who audience is. It can encompass such things as:

•Printing •Binding •Product build (when help is compiled into product)

Although production stage generally only requires management, you still need to spend a fair bit of time on proofing and liaising with production people.

Evaluate Project

The purpose of evaluation stage is to consider:

•Did project go according to plan? •Why? / Why not? •How individual team members contributed to overall project. •How project manager performed. •Whether documentation achieved its goals.

Your tracking metrics will come in handy during this stage; if there were any flaws in project progress, they should go some way towards identifying them. You might also use sample evaluation report provided by Hackos in Managing Your Documentation Projects by Hackos (1994), pp.514-518.

Is your documentation successful?

Now that you’ve written and released documentation, you need to determine whether it has achieved your goals. The only way to accurately do this is to conduct further user research.

TIP: For details on research methods, take a look at Managing Your Documentation Projects by Hackos (1994), User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by Hackos & Redish (1998), Social Marketing: New Imperative for Public Health by Manoff (1985), Designing Qualitative Research 2nd Edition by Marshall & Rossman (1995), and “Conducting Focus Groups – A Guide for First-Time Users”, in Marketing Intelligence and Planning by Tynan & Drayton (1988).

And that’s it! Remember, this process is an ‘ideal’ process. Take bits that suit you and your project, and leave bits that don’t.

Good luck!

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.