Item 1. As part of the analysis of what information needs to be covered, the content is customarily divided into topics. An owner is assigned for each topic.

In an online environment, you can get a lot of feedback about the information that is posted. When the topics are posted, some will be clearer than others. If there are critical topics that need to be improved, you can home in on those.

You can find out which topics to revise based on metrics such as which topics are read most often. If your site includes feedback surveys at the topic level, the feedback will help to determine what to revise.

Item 2. The other thing that can help is to put your best writers in charge of the overall structure of the information that you are delivering. Then the person in charge of the structure can provide review comments on key topics. A review comment that provides a clear statement of purpose for a key topic can clarify what the topic is supposed to be about, and can help the writer determine what to say. If that doesn’t work, the reviewer can provide a more extensive rewrite, concentrating on the topics that make all the difference in helping the audience get oriented.

It is much easier to define this role of structual designer / reviewer once you decide to develop information in a modular style. At first, the individual topics may or may not be as focused, informative, or clear as you would like. The role of the structural designer / reviewer is to provide oversight so that the delivered information set convinces the audience that they will be able to find the information they need.

Scott Abel, TheContentWrangler.com

Dear TheContentWrangler.com:

I would like to add a comment to this article, but I would like to do it anonymously so I don’t accidentally insult one of my coworkers, who may also read the article and who would probably know that I was talking about her if she saw my name. Can you add this comment in somehow without giving me away?

As a reason for not wanting to share content, I would add that not everyone’s writing abilities are the same. I avoid using some people’s writing because it simply isn’t very well done. The writing itself may sound bad, or the information may not be organized or presented in a way that I think is best.

Even though we have an editor who tries to make our modular content sound like everything is written by the same writer, some writers turn every edit into a battle. Back in the days when I worked on a magazine, we called that type of resistance “being married to your content.” Unfortunately, the people who do this tend to be the ones whose writing needs the most help—novices or people who simply aren’t as adept at putting words together. With maturity, the novices tend to get over the resistance. Unfortunately, those who aren’t adept usually don’t.

Whether the content actually belongs to me or belongs to my company, I’m responsible for the quality of what I’m in charge of. If using modular content decreases the overall quality of something I’m working on, I’m going to resist using it. I’d rather rewrite something or leave it out than to include something that I think is substandard.

Signed,

Anonymous

As your article in the Rockley Report points out, it is essential to analyze in order to determine “what kinds of constructions your Lego set will support”, including what major ideas will be used to name the concepts, tasks, and reference information that will be needed.

From the vocabulary and an understanding of the needs of the audience, it is possible to build a content set and to determine what a typical chunk (of various kinds) will contain.

I’ve seen two main obstacles to implementing modular writing.

Sometimes authors are not ready to think ahead and figure out what will need to be covered. They need to “just write it out” in order to see what the key ideas are. In this case, a rewrite may be needed, in which the first draft content is mined for coherent, standalone subjects for which modules can be written. This can pay off for the users, who are saved the work of doing this for themselves.

Second, the sense of owning the content leads authors to feel a need to tell a story. Once authors learn how to place the story-telling aspects of the work in the structure that holds the pieces together, they become able to create pieces that stand on their own.

Sometimes the users end up ignoring the story because they are interested in a particular module. So it may end up that the story will be omitted entirely, or just skimmed as a means of accessing the modules. But for starters, it’s helpful to think of removing the connecting information from within the modules, and perhaps placing that connecting information in the context in which the modules are presented. In that way, each module can focus on the content that needs to be conveyed.