Creativity relies on many mental abilities

The more I think about creativity, the more it looks like my ideas about creativity have been stereotyped and limited.

For one thing, creativity doesn’t work all by itself. No mental ability works in a bubble, though we may think of them that way to more easily make sense of them.

For example, how could someone create anything without a vast reserve of memories to draw on? That’s not to mention visualization or imagination abilities. You have to be able to choose what to create, and those choices require memories of similar things to the thing being created.

And visualization itself requires memory. How could you make a mental picture of something unless you had a reservoir of many things and how they appear?

Painters who create a new work make choices about how it looks. They pull up memories of colors and how they look when mixed, the effects of various sizes and types of brushes and the way something looks on various media. Other skills include planning, organizing and the ability to focus on one subject for a long period of time.

Translating visual, verbal, aural or tactile ideas into physical media, as all artists do, requires a whole set of mental abilities to control body movement.

The abilities to control our bodies can be finely honed with practice, but we learn them automatically when we are children–without any memory of how it happened.

Have you ever tried to feel or analyze how your hand and arm move to pick up a glass? I can’t do it. It’s an invisible process that I have no access to. Bodily control is so essential to our lives that we don’t have ways to mentally interrupt or analyze it. We “will” the movement, and presto! We move!

It’s really quite magical and invisible–yet we all make myriad intricate movements every day. It’s so integrated into our ability to function that we take it for granted.

Another example: how could someone create a product without analytical skills, like those used to determine the usefulness of the product? When Gideo Sundback designed the zipper in 1913, the inventor/engineer must have first systematically compared and evaluated other clothing fasteners, then decided that something else could work better. In fact, he improved upon a zipper-like design called a “clasp locker.”

This creative act also required memory, critical reasoning, design skills, evaluative abilities and other skills. Emotions, including frustration over the limitations of buttons and hooks, could have driven the inventor’s desire to create the zipper.

When someone does something “creative,” it’s not only creative. It could be analytical as well. A creative act may require intuition, evaluation, comparison, critical reasoning, memory, visualization, or any other mental function alone or in combination with others.

The other thing I’ve noticed about mental activity is that it’s often hard to separate one activity from another, because they work so well together. Clearly they are separate skills, but the mind or brain’s abilities work together seamlessly–so effortlessly and rapidly, in fact–that we can’t possibly analyze every process that’s going on at the time it’s happening. (Well, I have to speak for myself on this. Maybe Stephen Hawking could do it.) Retrospection is neccessary to figure out what we’ve been doing during retrospection!

These observations bring up a question that has dogged humanity since recorded history: What could have created something as complex as the human mind?

It also brings up a question that confounds researchers and has created entire branches of philosophy: How could such amazing abilities be housed in something as small as the brain?

I don’t have answers, but Emerson Pugh, an influential IBM executive, captured the essence of the problem with a humorous twist:

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.

Publication guidelines are more useful than a style guide

A style guide is vital for writers and editors when producing publications and other writing projects—but it’s not the whole story. 

Many writers and editors swear by a style guide when organizing, editing and writing their publications. Well-known style guides include the Chicago Manual, the AP Stylebook and the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications. Many corporations adapt elements of these to produce their own, distinctive style guides. But does it do everything you need as you plan, create and manage a publication or help project?  

What are publication guidelines?

The term “publication guidelines” is often used to describe submission guidelines for contributors to a magazine or technical journal.  I’m using the term in a wider sense: guidelines that cover any topic related to the publication that doesn’t fit in a style guide.

Often editors create a style guide to determine content and format in publications. A style guide can and should be part of publication guidelines, since a style guide is a set of stylistic guidelines for a publication. Publication guidelines, on the other hand, can be a bigger, wider-ranging document. But some are not.

What you include in these can vary widely. The publication guidelines published by the Virginia Highlands Community College and Delaware Valley College include topics like planning publications, logo requirements for the organization’s identity, and web design and development guidelines, among others. VHCC’s equal opportunity employment and accessibility statements give notice that the college complies with federal law in those areas.

 The Journal of Applied Communications, for members of the Association for Communication Excellence (ACE), publishes guidelines for contributors. These are fairly typical of publications that seek technical or scientific manuscripts from writers, in that they include formatting guidelines, organization requirements (such as an abstract) and the publication agreement. The journal Molecular and Cellular Proteomics offers highly detailed technical guidelines to help researchers publish research manuscripts.

Want to get your paper rejected by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques? They offer tips on that as well as their guidelines! Funny, but useful for the writers.

Why write publication guidelines?

Publication guidelines can save time, money and hassles for writers and editors over the long term. They can help future contributors and others taking over, or updating a publication–especially if the new writers don’t have expertise in help authoring, publication management or other editorial tasks. They are especially helpful when contractors know they are going to pass along a project to an in-house documentation team—or, probably a worse situation, to the developers. They are invaluable to contributors if the project must be turned over before it’s finished.  

They save money over the long run because editors and writers don’t have to reinvent the wheel and spend extra time duplicating research. 

Ideally, these guidelines should cover many types of publications. Usually only minor elements, especially those related to software-specific issue, would need much change from one type of publication to another. They can apply to employee publications like newsletters; online product help guides and manuals; websites; marketing publications like emailed postcards, and brochures and other publications mandated by an organization.  

Elements of publication guidelines

Publication guidelines contain much more information than what fits within the parameters of a style guide. They should include a style guide (or several, as needed), but also carry information that can help writers and editors manage any kind of publication imaginable. 

Publication guidelines may include:

·        Style and usage guides

·        Planning and organization guides

·        Help with the software and related procedures that are not well documented in the software help files

·        Help with software-related procedures like backing up the project

·        Mechanical issues, like formatting required in MS Word or HTML source documents

·        Notes on templates and other mechanical essentials

·        Lists of reference sources, like dictionaries, encyclopedias, technical websites, etc.

·        Documentation of project contributor names, their contributions

·        Documentation of any and all project help resources, including emails from support as well as resources found in books and on websites.

·        Documentation of project file locations, if not obvious from the project software

·        Other pertinent information like the EEOC, accessibility and corporate ID requirements noted above

The main point is to include as much information as you believe contributors need to do a good job with their contributions.

Publication guidelines can be as comprehensive as a budget, time, attention and energy allow. It may be best to err on the side of too much information; but that depends on the skill and education level of the writer or documentation team that will take over a project. 

How can publication guidelines help?

I developed publication guidelines for NuStep in order to provide a framework to help future contributors and administrators of an online training and reference project after my assignment there ends. It’s aimed at those not familiar with the project, who are also novices with help authoring tools. The staff who will take over have varying levels of writing and editing expertise, including some technical writing. However, none has expertise with modern help authoring tools, and their skill level with managing publications is unknown. 

The guidelines also contain general instructions on procedures related to using, in my case, Doc-To-Help, the software used to build the guide.  

How do I start a publication guideline project?

For a good start on planning and organizing publication guidelines, write a very short mission and specific goals—and state them at the beginning of the guidelines.  

Next, develop a tight outline based on those goals.
Here is the mission and goals for my project as noted in the publication guidelines. Many of the goals are quoted or adapted from Jean Hollis Weber’s excellent Technical Editors’ Eyrie, a website that provides many excellent resources, including an overview on planning an online help project:

Mission

“Make the online guide easy to read and use.”

Goals 

·        To make the online guide consistent and easy to navigate, read and understand

·        To make the job of its editors, writers and other contributors easier by providing a reference source

·        To inform new writers and editors of existing style and presentation decisions and solutions

·        To improve consistency within and among documents, especially when more than one writer is involved or when a document will be translated

·        To remove the need to reinvent the wheel for every new project, and document who contributed what to help future contributors

·        Establish standard style guidelines to make the user/reader’s experience easy and clear

·        Document and explain the use of standard styles and formatting in the template

·        To remind the writer of style decisions for each project, when one writer works on several projects that have different style requirements

·        To serve as part of the specifications for the deliverables, in the event this project is outsourced

·        To define which style issues are negotiable and which are not

·        To help with new users of [your software] and those unfamiliar with help authoring tools or web design applications in general

·        To help plan, organize and schedule the work involved in producing and updating the guide

·        To introduce usability testing to those unfamiliar it

 

A working outline 

1)     How to produce the online training & reference guide

a)     Mission & goals 

b)    Publication guidelines outline

2)     Planning guide

a)     To do list

b)     Tracking documents 

3)     Contributors’ guidelines

a)     Social rules for creating a style guide

b)     Editorial conventions

c)      English usage

d)     Ways to present information – best practices

e)    Research – talk first to potential readers and technical (subject matter) experts 

4)     Editorial style and conventions 

5)     Formatting standards 

6)     Build and maintain the guide

a)     Software – Doc-To-Help

b)     Get started with the software

c)      Help and support resources

d)     About the template

i)        Template purpose

ii)      Find the template

iii)    Apply template

e)     Back up the template

f)        Contribute to the guide

i)        Writing & editing process

ii)      Track progress

g)     Build the guide

i)        General instructions

h)      Provide access to the guide

i)        Maintain the guide

i)        Update the guide

ii)      Maintain the publication guidelines

j)        Back up the guide 

7)     Reference sources

a)     Reference sources

i)        Style guides

ii)      Dictionaries

(a)   English

(b)   Medical/technical

(c)   Other languages

iii)    Thesauri

iv)    Encyclopedias

v)      Quotations

b)     Online non-reference resources

i)        Email lists, discussion groups

ii)      Technical websites and other resources

(a)   Freeware & shareware software download sites 

8 )     Website usability testing 

9)     Whodunit – publication principals and contributors 

10) Technical notes and procedures

a)     Procedures and emailed help from software support 

11) Glossary 

The bottom line

Writers and editors need a plan and guidelines for projects and publications of all kinds. A style guide is helpful, but comprehensive publication guidelines—documentation of the documentation—are immensely more helpful, and save money and headaches in the long run.

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