For those of you who are new to Pamela’s work or long-time fans, you may be interested in a very useful slide deck on Writing for Reuse that Pamela posted on slideshare.net.  Here is the URL:

http://www.slideshare.net/abelsp/writing-for-reuse-learning-how-to-write-modular-content-for-reuse

I attended Pamela’s session on writing for reuse at the recent DocTrainWest, and I was surprised to see how much more useful, new information there is in the slide deck.  In particular, she offers more examples of diverse reuse plans.  She offers more examples of writing guidelines for the different elements in the reuse plan (which I find to be invaluable).  And she adds guidance for chunking and metadata to account for differences that must be accommodated in different uses (target documents, users, preferences) of the “same” reusable content.  This was a question that was raised at her DocTrainWest presentation, so I am delighted to see that she has addressed it so quickly and so competently.

In short, if you want to know HOW to make reusable content work, keep up to date with Pamela’s work in this area.

- Merle