William Andrew Publishing Technical Writing Series: Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation

Since I'm a beginning student of technical writing - the book introduced a lot of good ideas for me. However, it repeats itself so much - I have to quote the other reviewer who said it so wonderfully "if you don't have much to say on a subject, repeat it as often as possible." The ideas on how to chunk documentation was useful, the style guidelines I can get elsewhere. Bottom line - I used some information from the book, but the repetition was so annoying that I am giving it a 3 star rating.

I was recently investigating options for single sourcing when I came across Kurt Ament's book Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation. Based on the glowing reviews the book received, I decided to order it from Amazon.com.Unfortunately, the book was not what I expected. For the price of $[...] on Amazon, the book provides little help to experienced professional writers. My biggest complaint is that too many pages of the book are spent promoting the author's own ideas of style and usage rather than discussing true single sourcing issues. (134 out of 210 pages, to be precise, were dedicated to matters of style.) Some of the style and usage guidelines are handy for modular documentation, however, I believe each company should decide its own appropriate guide for style and usage rather than relying on the author's word. Had he couched his preferred guidelines as examples, perhaps I would be less inclined to view them negatively.Granted, understanding how to simplify and standardize language is key to developing text for reuse within a body of work and reuse text for localization. Writers need to understand how to simplify and standardize text before starting to think about how to leverage tools for single sourcing. Describing how to use standard language, however, is different than promoting a writing style, and probably requires far fewer pages than Ament dedicated to it.One of the reviews on Amazon raved about how well this book could be applied in conjunction with Information Mapping. I disagree. The author clearly does not approve of breaking processes or procedures into tables, which is a cornerstone of Information Mapping. In fact the author has very strict guidelines about when you should use a table and when you shouldn't. (Again, he is pontificating a particular style rather than offering solid advice on single sourcing.) Don't take my word for it; examine the table of contents very carefully before you buy this book.What the book does well, is offer good general advice on where to start thinking about chuncking your documentation in order to reuse it again and again. Also, Ament provides a concise lexicon of single sourcing terms that will help you properly articulate your ideas to your teammates. Most of the flags and highlighting I used in the book were confined to chapters 1, 2, and 5.This book might serve well in an introductory professional writing course, but if your company is seeking guidance on single sourcing, find a book that is tool specific or find a book that sticks to single sourcing and leaves style and usage decisions up to you.

The book provides a well-organized list of documentation features and how the features should be considered in the light of building modular documentation. The book includes good examples for just about every section. It could be used as the basis for building your organization's own style guide.I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because a fair amount of the content is repeated verbatim from one page to a following corresponding page.

This book is a style guide, with guidance like, "When introducing small sections that contain subsections, use itemized lists rather than sentences"; "Begin optional steps with a clear visual and verbal indication that they are not mandatory"; and "When listing commands, follow the capitalization rules on which your product is based." The beginning and end of the book provide a shallow discussion of single sourcing, but much of the book is style guidance like this. Maybe I'm missing something, but what does that have to do with single sourcing? I sure don't understand these 5-star reviews and encourage you to flip through the pages of this book before buying so you know what you're getting.

This book is fantastic. It is easy to understand and provides real life examples of single sourcing documents. I highly recommend it.

What a piece of crap. This is a book that spends a page and a half to tell me what 1st, 2nd and 3rd person means. If you need that kind of information sign up for Composition 101 and call me at the end of the semester.This book may be useful for entry level writers, but I personally want my money back. I spent [...] to get a [...] worth of content. This writer subscribes to the theory: if you don't have much to say on a subject, repeat it as often as possible. Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation

I found that this book helped me to develop my own strategy and style for creating content modules. The single sourcing element is largely down to which tool you are using (I use RoboHelp 11) but it was easy to transpose the concepts based on that tools functionality.There was a good deal of repetition, e.g. the text used as an introduction to a section in the "in this chapter" text was then used in the section itself and in various other places throughout the book. This serves to hammer home the messages I suppose but felt a little like filler at times. That said, the book is an easy read with a nice layout and style.