Hey, let’s give it a name

The year’s first big winter storm is expected to hit the U.S. East Coast this weekend. You know it’s big because the Weather Channel has given it a name: Jonas.

Screenshot from a Weather Channel video. I remember the weather being dreadful last February. Now I know who to blame: Octavia, Pandora….

A few years ago TWC started naming winter storms as if they were hurricanes — a  practice that amuses some, confuses many, and edifies practically no one. TWC’s explanation of the “science” behind naming winter storms is a technical-writing tour de force, mixing a few high-sounding facts with colorful graphs and a sprinkling of acronyms, and wrapping it all in a thick coating of earnestness.

Anyhow, I got to thinking. If TWC can give names to winter storms, why can’t we give names to the various parts of the technical writing process? Something like these….

Documentation plans

• Doc Plan Holliday: The project is one big gamble
• Doc Plan Watson: All parts of the project are in harmony
• Doc Plan Brown: Looking to the future and harking back to the past

Agile scrum stand-up meetings

• Scrum Meeting Spider-Man: Everything happens at a high level
• Scrum Meeting Superman: Faster than a speeding bullet
• Scrum Meeting Green Lantern: Dedicated to rooting out all evil from the user stories

The instructions for configuring the software

• Task Topic Gordian: It’ll tie you up in knots
• Task Topic Steely Dan: You know — pretzel logic
• Task Topic Kobayashi Maru: No right answer, but what you do will reveal your character

After all that planning and writing, the review draft

• Draft Hemingway: Kind of terse….
• Draft Faulkner: …and kind of verbose
• Draft Steinbeck: Not too terse, not too verbose, but maybe not quite “professional” sounding

Building the content for publishing

• Build Hoover: Content sucked up from everywhere
• Build Frankenstein: Content cobbled together to make something that, well, kinda works
• Build Macbeth: A combination of the first two, and everyone dies in the end

OK, it’s your turn. Use the comments section to tell me the ones I missed.

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