Reviewing document in printed form - affordances of print

[forfear]

Reviewing printed documents in paper provides many affordances.
What is your review workflow like?

Currently, we have a complex single-sourced document. It is used and customized for multiple product lines, system specs and server/client editions. So its like a 3 way single-sourcing project. Advanced features like Snippet Conditions gets us highly tuned reusable output.

I used to do reviews from the digital copy that was about it. Doing some support, from a recent user feedback and phone call, it was apparent an update was necessary. After doing updates, I printed out a copy, out of curiousity. In under a minute, I saw reuse and punctuation errors that I should not have passed if I did a proper review.

Repeated sections, stops, and spacing errors - like a White Christmas tree in Summer.

An eye opener.

Fixing the errors weren't hard. In Flare putting and include and exclude conditions are easy. Its checking and applying the right conditions that takes effort.

In times like this, its not a tool issue, it really is about process and thinking deeply about content.

[bobmoon]

I agree that reviewing in print is a valuable step. We are just embarking on an ambitious single source initiative, and it is imperative that writers generate the printed guides to verify that the content behaves in print as they think it should.

Right now, our writers have a "print first" mindset anyway, so they are very concerned with how the printed output will look. Once we get more comfortable with the single sourcing process, we will probably check it less often during the development phase, but I believe we'll always need to review both forms of output.

Bob

[ccardimon]

Maybe the thunderstorms we're having are making me more stupid than usual, but what is an "affordance?"

[Andrew]

"affordances" is a term used in psychology, conversation analysis, interaction design, and a few other fields. Basically, an "affordance" is a property of an object, technology, situation, etc. that enables a particular kind of use. So one affordance of large-scale broadband networks is that it is possible to work from home. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist.

I think viewing in print does tend to make one more likely to catch language problems. I don't know why this is -- it's true for me and almost everyone else with whom I've spoken about it. Something about printed, "physical" language makes us pay more attention to it. I would imagine there have been academic studies on this subject, but I haven't read any.

Typically, I do not print my work for review -- for a few reasons, some ecological, some monetary, and some time.

[ccardimon]

So an affordance is sort of a function, then.

[Andrew]

So an affordance is sort of a function, then.

It's not a function, at least, not in all senses, but that's probably a close enough definition for many uses of "affordance," especially outside of academia. An affordance is not so much a function, but a *use* that something offers, and I don't mean "offers" in the sense of that was the use it was designed for.

[ccardimon]

So an affordance is sort of a function, then.

It's not a function, at least, not in all senses, but that's probably a close enough definition for many uses of "affordance," especially outside of academia. An affordance is not so much a function, but a *use* that something offers, and I don't mean "offers" in the sense of that was the use it was designed for.

Let me try again. Would an affordance be similar to a variance, as in a zoning variance?

[forfear]

So an affordance is sort of a function, then.

It's not a function, at least, not in all senses, but that's probably a close enough definition for many uses of "affordance," especially outside of academia. An affordance is not so much a function, but a *use* that something offers, and I don't mean "offers" in the sense of that was the use it was designed for.

Let me try again. Would an affordance be similar to a variance, as in a zoning variance?

The term affordances was popularized in a study by Abigail J Sellen and a few world class sociologists in the book
The Myth of The Paperless Office
They discussed the 'affordances' of paper as compared to ebooks such as paper being tactile, easily available, cheap, you can flip, back reference pages, write notes on it, stack it, etc, unlike electronic documents which are rather limited in terms these 'features'.
It was a sociological study. They looked at paper in the modern work environment today and why it is still so prevalent even in the modern work environments of today with intranets, web pages, content management systems and visited the offices of the IMF, the World Bank, etc as it was used for heavy research work, analysis, publishing, clerical, administration, etc.
It was featured in the Wall Street Journal book review I think when it came out.
Its available on Amazon.

ccardimon, I was indeed really being just plain mischevious to use the word 'affordances' to see if it would trigger any response. Plain and simple language should indeed be our goal

Good job!

In response, I suppose you could say affordances could be replaced by any of these words and the sentence would still work
- benefits
- features

And reworking the post title
' Reviewing documents in print - why its better. '

[LTinker68]

And reworking the post title
' Reviewing documents in print - why its better. '

Wouldn't that be, 'Reviewing documents in print - why it's better.'

[ccardimon]

And reworking the post title
' Reviewing documents in print - why its better. '

Wouldn't that be, 'Reviewing documents in print - why it's better.'

Snort!

[forfear]