Morris Dean

Moristotle & Co. (a blog) · Editorial & Management

Principles of information style and design have been around for years. Look at the shelf life of Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, published in 1959 and still a bestseller. Producing Quality Technical Information is a gem of a book, whose ...

The editor and principal writer of Producing Quality Technical Information (1983) responds to the commentaries: answering questions about the sources of PQTI; discussing what the System Information group at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory were doing about usability from 1979 to 1983; comparing the predecessor nine "ease-of-use factors" with the seven...

In mid-1979, a study group was convened at the IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory to find ways to improve the usability of publications supporting the Laboratory's programming products. ¹ The group, called the System Information Ease-of-Use Study Group, consisted of technical writers, editors, and information planners---all members of the System Informati...

I would now like to summarize briefly what has been discussed. I begand by stating that one cannot produce good messages by just letting them grow like weeds during program development, then rewording them after the fact to make them read well. My experience and reflection have convinced me that, to create messages that work for their intended read...

Although the ease-of-use study group did not focus on the ease of use of computer programs, programming was not ignored. A number of recommendations were made to the programming development organization, and the following activities resulted: • A programming development ease-of-use study group has been established to determine what is needed to pro...

A psychological model can show the technical writer how to present information for effective communication by explaining how readers perceive, understand, learn, and remember. The principles underlying the model are the reader's psychological set, the mind's pattern-forming tendencies, the span of short-term memory, and the mind's need for reinforc...