Letting Go of the Words

Janice (Ginny) Redish has been helping clients and colleagues communicate clearly for more than 20 years. For the past ten years, her focus has been helping people create usable and useful web sites.A linguist by training, Ginny is passionate about understanding how people think, how people read, how people use web sites - and helping clients write web content that meets web users' needs in the ways in which they work.Ginny loves to teach and mentor - and to practice what she preaches. She turns research into practical guidelines that her clients and students can apply immediately to their web sites. Ginny's earlier books received rave reviews for being easy to read and easy to use, as well as comprehensive and full of great advice. She is co-author of two classic books on usability:* A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph Dumas)* User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn Hackos)She is also the author of the section on writing on www.usability.gov. Ginny's work and leadership in the usability and plain language communities have earned her numerous awards, including the Rigo Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication and the Alfred N. Goldsmith Award from the IEEE Professional Communication Society. Ginny is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication and a past member of the Board of Directors of both the Society for Technical Communication and the Usability Professionals' Association.

Chapter 1 Content! Content! Content! Chapter 2 Planning: Purposes, Personas, Conversations Interlude 1: Content Strategy Chapter 3 Designing for Easy Use Chapter 4 Starting Well: Home Pages Chapter 5 Getting There: Pathway Pages Chapter 6 Breaking up and Organizing Content Chapter 7 Focusing on Conversations and Key Messages Interlude 2: Finding Marketing Moments Chapter 8 Announcing Your Topic With a Clear Headline Chapter 9 Including Useful Headings Interlude 3 The New Life of Press Releases Chapter 10 Tuning up Your Sentences Chapter 11 Using Lists and Tables Interlude 4 Legal Information Can Be Clear Chapter 12 Writing Meaningful Links Chapter 13 Using Illustrations Effectively Chapter 14 Getting from Draft to Final Interlude 5 Creating an Organic Style Guide Chapter 15 Test! Test! Test!