User:APaskulin (WMF)/Research

This page is a repository for various notes as part of my general research into technical writing and communication.

From Managing your Documentation Projects by Joann T. Hackos
“Quality lies in a well-managed process. Standards and good people, although useful, are simply not enough to sustain quality through many years and many different people and projects. Only with a sound process in place and people training in managing the process can quality be consistently produced.” xiii (I think the key emphasis here is “and people training in managing the process”.)

“Technical communication always seemed in those days to be at the end of the life cycle.” xiv

“You have focused your efforts on what is [easily] measured, rather on what is important although difficult to measure.” 10

“Without good management, even the best people will have difficulty producing work of consistently high quality. With good management, even less experienced or skilled individuals will have the opportunity to do the best work they are capable of doing.” 18

From Basics of Qualitative Research by Strauss and Corbin
“attributes needed by qualitative researchers: appropriateness, authenticity, credibility, intuitiveness, receptivity, reciprocity, and sensitivity” 6

“Characteristics of a grounded theorist
 * 1) The ability to step back and critically analyze situations
 * 2) The ability to recognize the tendency toward bias
 * 3) The ability to think abstractly
 * 4) The ability to be flexible and open to helpful criticism
 * 5) Sensitivity to the words and actions of respondents
 * 6) A sense of absorption and devotion to the work process” 7

“persons act on the basis of meaning” 9

On the capitalization of team names
Should the names of teams and groups be capitalized in English? Is it "the design team" or "the Design Team"? Most English speakers seem to say that you should capitalize when referring to a specific group "the Design Team" and use lowercase when referring to a general type of group "a design team". But I've found a lot of debate about this and a lot of inconsistency in the way capitalization is used when it comes to any noun or noun phrase that refers to a specific entity.

Wikipedia says that capitonyms are “words which change their meaning between capitalized and uncapitalized usage”. There is a clear difference between "the design team" and "a design team" because of the difference in article. But is there a difference between "the design team" and "the Design Team"? In a strict grammatical sense, I would argue that there is no difference and lowercase is more correct. In a practice sense, there is a clear difference of importance. Even AP style, which is conservative about capitalizing names, capitalizes names that are "formal" or "not widely used generic terms". This is similar to the Wikipedia style guide that capitalizes "full names".

How formal is enough for capitalization? How uncommon? This ambiguity is the result of the fact that these proper names have slightly different characteristics from proper nouns. Proper names can include proper nouns, but they can also include common nouns or "the". When a proper name includes "the", Wikipedia classifies this a "weak proper name". Here are a few examples of inconsistent capitalization of weak proper names in English: "the pope", "the Queen" , "the Commission" , "the university"

In conclusion, I find that patterns of capitalization in English are being influenced by the expanding use of capitalization online for emphasis and irony. The result is a general shift towards capitalizing names that feel important or specific. When it comes to organizational documentation, team names are more likely than not to be capitalized. While I think this is ok for team names, we should be careful to not open the door to capitalizing anything and everything we think is important.

From Memory and Attention by Donald A. Norman
“If a person is asked to name what he has just seen, he stumbles, able to recall but a handful of items. In fact, the results of a large number of carefully controlled experiments indicate that humans can usually recall only a very limited number of items which have just been presented to them—from as few as four to, perhaps, ten items.” 85

“Meaningful material is relatively easy to learn, but we have trouble with isolated items.” 85

Skimming: “Erdmann and Dodge (1898) showed that in reading, for example, the eye assimilates information only in the brief pauses between its quick saccadic movements.” 86

“This process of increasing the memory span by efficient grouping of old items into new items, Miller called chunking.” 91