TECM 5200 Final Blog Post #5

The most important thing someone learning about content strategy should do is to listen to the advice and wisdom from the experts and academics who came before them. I deeply enjoyed learning from Dr. Kim, our client, and Val Swisher, particularly. I’ve also been inspired by Dr. Kim’s, Val’s, and others’ academic work relating to the field. I came into this master’s program thinking that technical communication wasn’t very academic. I felt like it was right there in the name: it’s technical. It’s utilitarian. Further, my undergraduate degree is in journalism. Journalism has heavily shaped my understanding of “content,” which is not academic at all. It’s also utilitarian and unlike what I have previously thought academia to be: verbose and self-important. I’m aware this is a bold opinion, and I will stand by it in some cases (sorry), but I don’t think my opinion holds up to the academic writing and research I’ve encountered in this course. I’ve been very surprised by how robust the fields of technical communication and content strategy are, especially when it comes to academic research around it. Even though I willingly signed myself up for a graduate degree in the field, it still did not occur to me until now that we’d be taking an academic approach to learning about it, such as with studies and academic articles. I’ve got to say, these academics really have a lot of great stuff to say. I also appreciate that the experts I’ve encountered in the course have actually done the work of technical communication and content strategy. That’s something I liked about journalism school. Many of my professors didn’t have PhDs or even master’s degrees, but they had been working journalists for decades. The experts I’ve learned from in this class have both decades of experience and advanced degrees dedicated to the further study of what they’ve already done for a living for years. How cool is that? Through all that rambling, take this with you: check your biases at the door and be a student. I never saw myself enrolling in school again, but here I am. Be a student! Get your academia on!
Someone learning about content strategy should absolutely not develop and conduct their strategy alone. In this course, I’ve learned that content strategy should be a huge, collaborative effort among all interested parties — users, writers, subject-matter experts, and other affected departments in the business, such as marketing and legal. That long list of groups may feel like too many cooks in the kitchen, but I assure you, every one of these groups has a valuable opinion about the content. It may be a hassle, but I believe content is at its best when it’s the most accurate, it serves users, it’s easy to read, and marketing and legal are happy with it.

Even though the user is the person most directly benefitting from the content or, obviously, using it, sometimes their input is of least priority when developing content. Further, it’s easy to develop content or processes around the content in a vacuum. The user, arguably the most important stakeholder, is the hardest stakeholder to reach. For our client particularly, I can imagine certain content is top secret until the product is launched. How, then, can users be included in the development process? To that, I suggest extrapolating past user feedback and applying it to the content in development. It also seems inevitable that changes have to be made after the content has already been published. I’ve learned this in the journalism world in the form of issuing a correction, which actually seems like a much bigger deal than updating your manual and including it in the boxes of technology going forward. It is best to get as much right before publication as you can, though. So don’t do it alone. I also learned I was wrong for a second time in this course. I did not want to work on a group project on top of the full-time job I work, but I couldn’t have come up with the content strategy for our assignments all by myself. Thank you, Jack and Auriana!
Believe it or not, I think the most important part of this course for my career goals is the deep, academic-style research required to pull off content strategy. My firm has a lot of content, but I may not have thought to approach an audit at all, let alone with a whole methodology and strategy. I am aiming to conduct a content audit of our website writeups and project writeups in the second half of this year. Now, I’m armed with the tools to approach it smartly because of this class.