Recently, O’Reilly Media released a new book by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein: The Twitter Book. A review of the book will be coming in the next couple of weeks.

What’s interesting about the book isn’t its subject matter, but rather the way in which it was written. Believe it or not, the book was done in PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint. A piece of software that’s generally used to create presentation slides.

Shortly after the book’s release, Tim O’Reilly recently blogged about the book, the writing process, and how the approach to the The Twitter Book was an attempt to reinvent the concept of the book in the age of the Web. Read O’Reilly’s post for the details.

So what does this have to do with tech comm?

A lot, believe it or not. Each page is self contained. In most cases, you don’t need to read other pages of the book in order for that page to make sense. This approach is very similar to a concept with which you might be familiar: topic-based writing.

As Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software said in a session he did at DocTrain East 2008, a topic is a standalone piece of content. It doesn’t rely on information from any other piece of content in a book or manual or help system. Or anything else for that matter. That’s the approach O’Reilly and Milstein took, whether they realized it or not.

While Tim O’Reilly described how The Twitter Book was created as being a different approach to publishing, it’s also a different approach to writing. In a scenario like this, you need to pack a lot of information on to a single page. The space constraints force you to write very tightly. You need to contain an idea or a concept within the alloted space.

On top of that, the type and spacing are probably larger in this kind of layout — paragraphs are probably not going to be 12 point Garamond, single spaced. This means even fewer words.

Words and images

A book like The Twitter Book is also very visual. You need to work text around the visuals; everything has to blend together. Which isn’t easy.

If you’re self publishing, then you have to be a good visual designer. Or, that the very least, have a good grasp of the concepts of design. Or, you need to engage a designer.

It’s a lot of work

Doing what O’Reilly and Milstein did with The Twitter Book is definitely a lot of work. In addition to the design, doing something like this requires:

1. A lot of planning, and probably more than a couple of designs being scrapped.
2. An understanding of topic-based writing.
3. The ability to write tightly. And then some!

One more point: the content must be both relevant and usable. Wrapping fluff in pretty imagery just doesn’t cut it. And it does your readers a disservice.

Taking the idea to tech comm

If you haven’t already guessed, I can see this concept being applied to documentation. I’m not saying that you should ditch your favourite tool for PowerPoint. But using what you have — whether it’s FrameMaker, Blaze, InDesign, Scribus, or even a presentation app — you can adapt the techniques and ideas behind The Twitter Book to documentation.

Admittedly, not all documentation. This approach is great for quick reference guides or visual references for a set of features of an application.

I’m not sure that this approach will work in all cases, but it’s definitely worth considering.

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Open Source and tech comm: another view
2. (Mostly) Tech books for technical writers
3. Use cases: an essential part of any tech comm project