We have some text, let’s say a procedure with an objective and introduction in a few steps, and we need to make one or two sentences for release notes. What are your favorite features in Writer? Everybody on the team loved it from the first second. We didn’t have to get out of our mission-critical application. And if you hover over the underline, you get all this information. Here are the squiggly lines, here’s what the underlines mean, and what the colors mean. If we had been urgent about it, the actual amount of time that we’d have spent rolling out Writer to production would be four or five hours.Įverybody loved it more than Google Sheets. We got up and running within a couple of days, but that’s just because we took our time on it. She just came in and said, I’m going to help you do this. Our customer success person at Writer helped us with importing from our big Google sheet of >800 dictionary terms to Writer’s Terminology tool. So the false positives were a huge show-stopper. You’ve wasted your trust in your employees by telling them that they have to use it, and then you waste any time that they actually try to use it. If a tool has too high a false positive rate, or too high a false negative rate, you’ve wasted the time creating.
#Documentation writers professional
That’s when we started looking for a professional tool.
So we decided to make a Python checker to see what was going on, and that’s where we found that our content had all of these mistakes and a lot of user errors. Like in our good examples, we were using words that we weren’t allowed to use. It took about a year to build this really good dictionary, and it was all manual, and we were making a lot of mistakes. So for each of those words, we decided on part of speech, a definition, and a good example and a bad example. So we took our own existing documentation and we parsed it through a Python script that showed us all of the unique words and the frequencies that were found.Īnd then for each word, we decided what part of speech we wanted to use. So it has a lot of words that we don’t need, so we said, this is cool, but not really what we want. It was made originally for Boeing, so it has a lot to do with aerospace and design – this is what ‘ASD’ means. We first looked at ASD-STE100, which is a standard for controlled language that’s used across high-tech industries. SentinelOne’s ebooks page How’d you go about the process of trying to implement “controlled language?” It’ll make it cheaper to translate, and it’ll make our writing more consistent, which would help with our brand and positioning as a leader in the field. It’ll make it easier for everybody to read. We said, that’ll set us up for globalization. So we thought about controlled language early on. We have to be able to talk to any user of any level of English around the world. It looks like one company.Īlso, we have to be globalization-ready. It doesn’t look like seven people wrote different parts of it. When somebody reads one of our books, it’s a SentinelOne document, and it’s not different from any other document. We work as a team, so every book we deliver has topics created by everybody on the team. Without a tool enforcing that consistency, it’s really hard. There are also writers and trainers and many other teams, and we’re all trying to be consistent. Now there are eight writers, and that’s only the product documentation writers. First there was one writer, then there were three. Consistency and quality became big problems because our team was growing.
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