Schuetz

1. They don't communicate their central message and their desired outcome.
It is important you know the key purpose of your document: Who is your audience? What do you want to happen as a result of someone reading it? Try to understand the user and see through their eyes. You can do this by pre-empting questions the readers may have:

2. They are inconsistent or unclear in what they want to say.
The pyramid style of writing, devised by Ron Blicq, is a very useful way of arranging the structure of your document:

Professional business writers, such as technical authors, typically break a document down into small, discrete units of information, organised around a skeleton of topic headings. If you use this "component" or "modular" approach, you can plan and structure the document using the heading "labels" that describe each section. These signposts help enormously when you start writing, and they can also help you be consistent and avoid missing out any important content. Indeed:

Your list of headings can be structured to form a storyboard, to guide the reader through your document. Meaningful titles for sections also help with the readability of your document, as they enable readers to scan down a document and find the sections that relate or are of interest to them.

3. They don't use the best style of language.
Here is some advice regarding the words you use:

4. They leave insufficient time to write the information, or spend too much time on presentation.
The best way to get a writing project completed on time is to adopt standard project management principles:

It's not uncommon for 30% of a writer's time to be spent working on the "look and feel", once all the writing has been done. Of course, documents designed to be read on paper don't work when they are read on screen, so it's important to change the formatting to suit the delivery medium. The more documents (and the content contained within them) are published in different places, the more important it will be for you to be able to create these without being faced with spending lots of time on reworking. Look at the tools you use, to see if you can control the "look and feel" independently of your content. You can achieve this partly by using standard templates, but you might want to consider using content management software.

5. They present the information badly.

6. They don't have a manageable way to maintain the information.
A key aspect to managing any business information is for people to be able to:

This is also true for business documents. However, it isn't always easy, with many organisations being in state of having lots of out-of date or missing documents, or more than one version of the same piece of information.

Having a dedicated writing or editing resource, such as that offered by Cherryleaf can help, but it's also important to look at the systems and tools you have in place for creating, maintaining and improving documents.

One popular approach is to have one source for content, allowing you to reuse pieces (or components) of information. These pieces are managed and maintained in a database, and then published to different audiences, documents, and in a range of media formats, such as print and online. You can write information once and re-use it many times, and make changes to it in one place. It promises a reduction in errors and duplication, time needed to review content, translation costs (as you can re-use content translated in the past), as well as better consistency.

Take the Cherryleaf 1 minute Documentation Audit

(c)

Ellis Pratt co-owns a technical writing consultancy called Cherryleaf Ltd. We work with developers of software who are afraid of losing their customers and frustrated with the cost of supporting them. Take the Cherryleaf 1 minute Documentation Audit See Cherryleaf Technical Authors and Documentation Specialists