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Front Page: Quick, cheap quality?

Editorial Assistance
Suite101


Parens and brackets


Tracking changes in Word


Strange traditions


Water qyality

However, many managers today say that speed, quality, and economy are compatible. For the past few years, a Government mantra has been “faster, better, cheaper.” Acquisition reform means that the Defense Department meets requirements “by buying smarter and faster and getting better products at a cheaper price,” Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen wrote in his 1998 “Annual Report to the President and the Congress.”

One example of attempting to do things faster, better, and cheaper with high public visibility has been the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“Using a management philosophy dubbed ‘Faster-Better-Cheaper,’ or ‘FBC,’ NASA tried to develop high-quality, low-cost space missions on short schedules,” wrote James Oberg of United Press International in March 2000. “But many projects began failing at an alarming rate,” and a specially appointed panel “told NASA the FBC approach wasn’t working and needed major changes.”

However, space historian Howard McCurdy, professor of public affairs at American University, told Space.com that “faster, better, cheaper” is “a good concept. It’s just very difficult to implement and practice.… In general, it’s a cultural problem.” “‘Pick any two,’” he said, “is the dominant culture in the aerospace industry” but “it’s not a fact of life.” It is possible, he said, to have speed, quality, and economy. He pointed to “the culture that dominates the new information-age industries … which is, you can simultaneously improve cost, schedule and performance.… It’s why Microsoft was so much better, 20 years ago, than IBM.”

“Faster, better, cheaper” is possible, said McCurdy, “if you use the right management techniques and you do the correct engineering, and you do the testing that is necessary—and you don’t under-fund the project! In concept, it is a workable system.”

McCurdy’s comment about not underfunding projects indicates that there are limits: at some point, reductions in cost and time will impinge on quality. Not every project offers opportunities for cost-cutting or schedule reduction. The correct question to be asked, therefore, is, “Where do we have room for improvement?”

In publishing, if you don’t allow time to spellcheck a document, you clearly are sacrificing quality for speed. The point of diminishing returns comes long before that, however. As Words Into Type (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974) states, “The editor must be alert at all times to inaccuracies and conflicting statements. Geographical features must be carefully checked, an exacting task in some books. Classical, historical, and literary references may be inexact and must be scrutinized. Dates and all references or statements in which there is a time element must be examined with care.” And these are only a fraction of the editor’s duties that Words Into Type lists.

The idea of carefully checking accuracy applies to writing as well as editing. “There are no safe shortcuts,” wrote David S. Broder, a political reporter for the Washington Post in Behind the Front Page (New York: Touchstone, 1987). “… the only way to cover a story is to cover it: to spend as much time with the people as humanly possible, to ask as many questions as they will tolerate, and never to assume I know what is going on without asking.”

Undoubtedly, there are publications projects that can be done faster, better, and cheaper—some projects have fat in all three areas. Achieving quality in publications, however, means following a system, even when time is short. “Things will get out of control,” General Lee says in the film Gettysburg. “That is why we have orders.” Speed, cost, and quality need to be managed—not simply one exchanged for another in a moment of panic. We owe it to our clients not to rush things if it would unacceptably reduce quality.

We also owe it to our clients to look for ways to do our jobs better—faster and cheaper too. Can we always improve all three? No. Should we try? Yes.

—Steve Dunham

Suite101

The links cover nine categories: Education, Humor, Internet Research Tips & Techniques, Site Promotion, Technical Writing, Technical Writing Books, Writing Related Message Boards, Writing Resources, and Web Sites. Under Tech Pubs Web Site, one of the Top Five Web Sites selected by the Technical Writing page editor, “Resources for Technical Writers” has recommended reading, mailing lists, related websites, and organizations. You could probably spend days surfing the links and not exhaust the useful possibilities.

Another link is to an e-zine called “For Technical Communicators” that had a very useful article, “Nine Techniques for Taking Better Screen Snapshots.”

Other articles included “Mentoring,” “Software Product/Project Development Life Cycle,” “Tips for Technical Writers,” “Software Documentation and Software Processes,” and “How to Figure Document Development Time.”

Discussions as of June 6, 2001, included “How to Work as an Off-Site Technical Writer,” “Tech Writing Horror Stories,” “Need Help with Client/Server Procedures,” and “Online Writing Course.” The related Technical Writing and Editing page has been “retired”—evidently new content is not being added, but the page is still there with lots of useful material.

Parens and Brackets

If a digression occurs within parentheses, brackets are used. Parentheses should not appear within parentheses, nor should brackets appear outside parentheses, except in special cases, such as some mathematical expressions or legal citations. (Brackets within parentheses can look awkward [creating a second level of parenthesis], and Words Into Type recommends using em dashes in place of brackets where possible.)

Brackets are also used to indicate anything added to a quotation—whether the quoted material is set off by quotation marks or block indention. “The matter enclosed [in brackets] may be wholly independent of the text, or it may be words supplied to secure complete and understandable sentences,” notes Words Into Type. In any case, it is important to distinguish anything that is not part of the quotation. Some styles, such as that used by the Associated Press, do not use brackets and are the poorer for it, often making it hard to distinguish a speaker’s or writer’s parenthetical remarks from words added by a reporter or editor.

Keeping Track of Changes in Microsoft Word

Go to Tools, Track Changes, Highlight Changes, and select “Track changes while editing.” You also have the option to “Highlight changes on screen” or “Highlight changes in printed document.” These last two options, however, may be better left unselected. Viewing changes while you are making them can be confusing as well as deceptive. Try making changes with the option on, then turn it off and see supposed spaces and paragraph breaks disappear. As for printing a document with changes highlighted, it’s easy to forget that you have this option on when you print a “final copy.”

“Track Changes” won’t track everything. Take the case of tables. If you choose “select row,” then “delete row,” you will see a warning that such a change will not be tracked. However, if you simply select text and write over it—and are not deleting cells—Word will highlight the change. The addition of bullets and tabs will be tracked, but changes to font, spacing, justification, indention, borders and shading, margins, and columns will not. Changing case by selecting Format, Change Case, will not be tracked, but a case change will be tracked if you change it by typing over the letters.

If you have already edited a document and did not select “Track Changes,” there is still a way to see what changes were made. First, open the edited document. Then go to Tools, Track Changes, Compare Documents, and open the original unedited version (assuming that you kept a copy). The changes you made will appear on the screen.

Caution: Track Changes and Compare Documents do not work well together. If you have already tracked changes in at least one of the documents, the following message will appear when you opt for the Compare Documents feature: “The original document already has changes. Word may not detect some existing changes. Compare anyway?” The problem is more complicated than not detecting changes. Word may mark items that were added as having been deleted, then added back. In addition, it may mark some items as changed that were not.

Even if that happens, however, there’s a way around it: save both documents as plain text and close them. This will erase all the change tracking that Word has done. Then open the more recent one and use Compare Documents to find the differences. All the text changes should appear. We’ve made it our practice to turn on “Track changes while editing” with every document. It does increase the file size, but it’s worth it, because Track Changes or Compare Documents can preserve your sanity. Once a boss complained that in editing a document we had given too much emphasis to one organization. Compare Documents revealed that all we had done was spell out the organization’s name—and when we told the author, he had no objection.

—Julie Wright

Strange Traditions

How about the traditions of “friction, uncertainty, fluidity, and disorder,” “terrorist incidents,” or “facilities or equipment”? All these have been labeled “traditional.” Some other traditions are “fan blade-out and oil starvation testing,” planning templates, database environments, cockpit instruments, and microorganisms that cause anthrax, Q fever, and dengue. In the good old days we had pleasanter traditions: Thanksgiving dinners, vacations at the seashore, going to see fireworks on the Fourth of July. Even the sad traditions, such as getting together with family after a funeral, were not as impersonal as facilities or equipment, nor as antisocial as terrorist incidents.

Will today’s children some day look back with fondness on the traditions of oil starvation testing and database environments? Or is the word traditional being sorely abused? William Safire, in Take My Word for It (New York: Times Books, 1986), noted that the words “usual (common or frequent occurrence) … customary (conventional, or conforming to previous practice), habitual (unfailing repetition), and typical (following a pattern)” all have similar meanings but are still different.

However, “traditional, which used to mean ‘time-honored,’ … is undergoing a vogue use to mean just about everything in the paragraph above.… “When in doubt remember Claude Rains in Casablanca: He did not say, ‘Round up the traditional suspects.’”