Every Page is Page One: Topic-Based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web by Mark Baker

Every Page is Page One: Topic-Based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web Reviews

• 
  Robin

  Mark Baker is absolutely committed to doing whatever he can to make writers present their technical content in a way that works for the way readers tend to try to access and use it on the Web. The book is convincing, clear, and articulate, but not always easy to apply immediately to one's own writing. This book occasionally makes some assumptions about its audience and what habits they need to be argued out of. As a result, I found myself puzzled at being persuaded out of opinions that I never held in the first place, which distracted focus from the more subtle principles in the book that I did feel I needed to explore further.
  
  The author maintains an excellent blog at everypageispageone.com where he continues his crusade and elaborates on his ideas. Book and blog together are a stellar resource to return to again and again.
• 
  Michelle

  
  Some good ideas. Worth reading.
  
  Could have been much tighter. Seemed to be a lot of repetition, which would be resolved, in part, with better organization.
  
  I wish it would have suggested some ways to measure the success of an EPPO initiative. Are there Google analytics that are useful? What else?
  
  Even as an appendix, an example - from beginning to end - would have been worthwhile. It's one thing to show examples that already meet EPPO standards, but it would be more meaningful to show a before and after accompanied by an explanation that anticipates the real-world issues that may come up in applying these principles.
• 
  Nancy

  some clear and useful ideas, with a lot of extra fluff around them.
• 
  Reid McKenzie

  A solid review of how content access differs in semantic web environments and how presentation too should change according; but it could have been a pamphlet but for following its own suggestions
• 
  Magdalena

  5 stars for the idea, 3 stars for its implementation. All in all it’s so simple it’s revolutionary in a way.
• 
  Christina

  As with any other non-fiction book, Baker tends to belabor his point. I think at some point I wrote "Yeah, we get it." in the margins.
  
  Otherwise though, great book for arguing how tech docs should be written in the age of the Web, and why so. There are some tidbits that I think over about how they can be applied to tech docs I work with, and there are other points that I would pull from to reference were I to work on a new doc set.
  
  Some of my favorite ideas were about how users forage for information, and in so doing, Baker talks widely on different ways of doing linking and minimizing content reuse. I know some of these points are contentious (some people really hate wikis and how they over link things), but I personally agreed with the points he made about them.
  
  I didn't like how Baker could be very high level in describing an idea without giving some concrete examples (e.g. "Here's how you would do it with this tool!") or giving examples that aren't quite relevant to tech docs (e.g. "Look at this recipe and look at this bird taxonomy!"). It would have been nice if some of his reference examples were from actual tech docs, and not just Google Cloud's. Of course, the problem with any of these references is how they may no longer exist by the time a reader picks up this book.
  
  Regardless, some choice bits in this book and definitely one I'll flip back through when thinking about doc improvements.
• 
  Lilah

  I really like the premise of this book—that you should expect readers to come to your topic from the web without context, and so you need to bear that in mind when writing for the web. This means that you provide context and links and ensure that your reader stays oriented. Great premise. I wish the book had better examples. As in many things, the devil is in the details—how do you do this when you work with complex technical concepts that build on each other? How do you do this when the software you document requires you to build on the concepts in other topics? I think the author could spend less time debunking the need for chapters and “books” and more time explaining how this can be achieved. But, he is absolutely right, I love the premise and I’m enjoying learning how to apply it to my writing.
• 
  Scot

  This might be one of the best books for technical communication that I've ever read. Mark presents a great case for changing the long-held paradigm used by technical writers. Unfortunately, now I have to go rethink my strategy for my own work.
  
  Dammit.
• 
  Patty

  Rantings of a real academic. No real clear things to do to make "every page page one". But there are lots of paragraphs on ramblings of somebody who clearly thinks they have something important to say, but never says it. :head-slam:
• 
  Kassioppe

  I am a technical writer, not for softwares but for manufacturing. I found the book at first interesting, but too repetitive that it bored me out of it. I'll take a few ideas from the book, but not much. I think it would suit beginner better.
• 
  Jeff Specht

  required reading for a professional writing class I'm taking. Still, Baker makes a lot of good points regarding creating content for the current web browsing generation.
• 
  S

  I'm an EPPO fanboy and the first half is super solid, but this goes off the rails a bit in its back half - I attribute this more to the marching on of authoring tooling tech than anything else.
• 
  Ioana

  I was expecting much, much more from a book that was so often mentioned in technical writing circles. The principles of EPPO are sound, but the book really lacked examples. The explanations relied on Wikipedia and food recipes, which did help in making the point, but it wasn't at all clear how a person would go about actually applying the principles in real life.
  
  The book is also very focused on the impact the web (and google) have on the way users browse the documentation, which 1. DUH and 2. doesn't apply to my situation. At times, it felt like the author was trying to convince "old-school" technical writers why moving away from PDFs is the way to go, but the point was belabored. In general, the book could have used a better structure - the subchapters sometimes felt like the author/editor just wanted to thrown in some headings to break a wall of text.
• 
  Meg

  The book provides good rationale and details about moving to the EPPO approach that the author champions. However, it turns out that we already follow this approach for the most part where I work, so I didn't take away as much from the book as I'd hoped.
• 
  Magdalena

  Excellent ideas and an easy way of explaining things. Lots of examples and possible ways of using the ideas in the technical writing world.
  I already implemented the EPPO guidelines into my documentation and I think it just works!
  The reading experience was (as expected) very good :)
• 
  Sarah

  I picked up a few things, but it was a little repetitive.