Moving on to the course material surrounding the definition phase of content strategy, I found a few new interesting concepts – mainly in the description of building and delivering a framework document. I find that I really like the overall structure of the framework document presented in the text; it is very clear in how it is laid out to present the most value to stakeholders during this kind of audit. The way it is divided into different subsections that focus on different organizational and content goals seems like the most clear and efficient way to get across to stakeholders the large amount of data that comprises a proper content audit. I also found the text’s advice against a format that only defines “pain points” to be particularly useful – nobody likes being told that what they made is universally bad, and pointing out positives would seem to be a good idea in this scenario.
I feel that this will be most meaningful to my career goals in education due to its simplicity and ease of reading. I think that this kind of structure is very intuitive, and guiding students through how this kind of document is structured will be particularly helpful in helping them to internalize how we can provide so much information to stakeholders in such a concise document. I think that conciseness can be a major concern for many writers and learning how to present information in a more efficient way is a prime goal for aspiring technical communicators. Showing students this structure could help ease some concerns they may have about the overall process of distilling down their thoughts and data into something that adds the most value for a client.
Joseph L Meyers 