Look at that bread. It’s the first loaf of bread that came out normal since the Big Move back in July.
Well, technically it’s two loaves. My sourdough recipe is hard to predict. It either makes one pretty big boule or two normal loaves of bread.
But, even though I’m pretty happy with how it turned out (that could be its own meandering blog post with a recipe behind a couple of rollover ads), that’s not really the point of this post. This point is about how I messed up after just 10 months on the job.
Learning Outcome: This lesson supports the “Write according to a process” outcome.
Technical Expertise
There’s a skill you pick up as a technical writing teacher. I think the Greeks called it hubris. It’s the sense of familiarity you develop with technical subjects after reading, writing, and talking about them for weeks or months (or years) on end. I mean, I have very strong feelings about dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) systems, and I’m not a radiologist or rad tech. I can tell you why cross-laminated timber products are the sustainable building material of the future, but I’m no civil engineer. I’ve never been to a NASCAR race, but I can give you several good reasons why the handful of races requiring governors are dumb.
Lave and Wenger would say that I was moving from the periphery to actual participation, and that I was testing my legitimacy in this new community I’ve joined. The subject matter expert (SME) on this project isn’t quite as positive about the event.
You see, I’ve been working on a project for most of the time I’ve been working at the New Job. I won’t say much more than that because it was kind of a big deal.
The Lead Up
Back in February, I was asked to write a few short blurbs about a product that didn’t exist yet, at least not in the way I was describing. There was an update coming thanks to some new technology, and we wanted to have marketing materials ready to go. I got a brief rundown on it, wrote my blurbs, and went on my way to the next project.
Eventually, I was brought on to work on this project as the primary Writer, creating flyers, web material, emails, social media posts, and other content to talk about how awesome it is. And, it is pretty cool. I was happy to get to work on it.
Some of the material was supposed to talk about a new algorithm in the device that let it do something really cool. Now, at the risk of being confusing, I’ll also say that there was a second algorithm to promote that also let the device do something pretty cool. Not as cool as the Big Update, but still pretty cool.
So, to review. Enhancement 1: Really cool. Enhancement 2: Pretty cool.
The tricky thing to remember (that I did not catch when I read all of the documentation) is that these two enhancements are totally unrelated. Some of you might guess where this is going.
The Event
Six months after I was brought on the project as the official Writer, we were getting ready to send out the last of the marketing materials for this round of updates. There was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait here, which is normal for any big product release anywhere.
There were a couple of emails, several social media posts, a product webpage plus some other website updates, a new product flyer, an internal announcement to the company, and a technical blog post, all going out within 24 hours of each other. Many of these were written several months earlier and updated as we heard more about the enhancements over time (what would be in the update, what the exact specs were, what was important to promote, etc.).
The second part of that last sentence is what made some trouble.
The Result
When all was said and done, one document made it out with a single sentence with a compound subject that was poorly worded and implied that Enhancement 1 and Enhancement 2 were related. Specifically, that Enhancement 1 existed because of Enhancement 2.
That document was read by a customer who had worked with us to develop a different product, one that did something like Enhancement 1 without using anything like Enhancement 2. (For the record, they are two totally different things that have similar names and a similar end result.) That customer sent back a pretty simple (not angry) email asking what was up.
We immediately stopped updating existing material on the company website, stopped sending emails, halted social media posts, and otherwise stopped the victory lap I was taking around my cubicle for finally finishing a very long, very large project.
The Postmortem
In the end, we decided that the issue was a breakdown of a few processes. One member of the team (a technical expert) left partway through the project and was replaced. Another member of the team (a fellow non-technical person) and I put a lot of work into getting content created. When we suddenly needed to push everything out the door, a lot of the little refinements we did over the prior months contained bits and pieces of the original goals of documents, rather than the new goals.
That is, a document might have originally had a goal of “hype these 5 things,” later had a goal of “emphasize this thing, but mention these other two,” and finally ended with a goal of “shout the glory of this one thing from the rooftops.” In the end, some of the original verbiage around stuff we didn’t need to hype still lingered on in vestigial phrases and half-references. We cleaned a lot of them up, but we missed one.
That one isn’t going to result in any lawsuits. No one will die because of it. I seriously doubt anyone will order the product because the error made them think something that isn’t true.
But, it made me remember something very important that I used to teach all the time. Know the goal of what you’re creating, and stick to that goal. In professional writing, sometimes goals change, sometimes they change several times, and sometimes the changes are so slow and minor that you struggle to keep track of whether you’re still hitting the mark.
Making Bread
Anyway, back to that bread. I can’t stress enough how happy I am that it came out right. The crust is soft and chewy because I remembered to brush it with melted butter right when it came out. I learned that from a cooking group I’m in on Facebook from someone else whose bread usually comes out with a hard, shell-like crust.
I remembered to melt the butter with some olive oil, because that stops the butter from browning and helps even out the temperature so it doesn’t spatter.
I correctly spaced out the sequence of feeding the starter, getting a bulk rise, rounding, letting individual loaves rise, shaping, proofing, and baking. Now the crumb is soft but not cake-like. I picked that up from a bread cookbook my wife got me for Christmas a few years ago.
I prepped my baking stones, which some friends told me I should get for making pizza, and has since turned out to be great for all baking (including pies!). I rotated my loaves halfway through cooking, which I’ve learned I need to do with the oven in the new house.
But, I forgot to cut the tops of the loaves before I baked them, which is part of the reason they didn’t rise as much as they should have in the oven.
Much smaller scale and impact on this screw up, but the lessons are similar. Even when things seem like they’re trucking along really well, it’s good to remember that there’s a process in place for a reason.
