Technical Writers Started the Green Movement

Have you heard the term Go Green?  I bet you have.  It’s the new buzz word.  Everyone’s doing it.

I remember reading an email one day.  The tag-line after the signature block read and I quote: “Don’t print this email unless you have too.  Save the trees.  Go Green.”

I must admit that line has stuck with me since then.  So much so I pondered, where did this green movement spring from?  I mean everything starts somewhere doesn’t it?

That’s when I realized that Technical Writers started the Green Movement.  Trace it back, go on, I’ll wait.

Ok, for those of you who don’t believe me, I’ll explain.  Technical Writing isn’t just paper manuals anymore.  I know this from personal experience.  I can remember preaching Online Help (that’s another post) to my clients back in the ’90s.  I have been touting and sometimes cajoling clients for almost 10 years now into creating Online Help, web sites, and PDFs versus wasting tons and tons of paper creating a linear, not always easy to follow, paper manual.

I remember standing in a mortgage office with my then boss.  I had been using Adobe Acrobat to create PDFs for other clients.  It was then a new fangled thing about taking a document, snapping an image, and saving it in a new file that looked like a the document you were creating.  Then that was easily emailed to whomever you like.

The debate started because back then there were a lot of disclosures that borrowers needed to receive, some needed to be filled out, signed and sent back (all through snail mail, if you can image that).  Other documents were just information that didn’t need signing.  There were several flaws with this system.  (1) The loan officer had to print all those forms, (2) the disclosures had to be mailed to the borrower, (3) the borrower had to sign some of the forms, and (4) the borrower had to send the signed forms back.  My bright idea all those years ago:  “Why not just send a PDF of the forms and have the borrower print and sign only the necessary forms?”  It was unheard of.  It couldn’t be done, I mean no one in the industry does that. 

Needless to say, I lost this battle.  Maybe I was just too ahead of my time, maybe nobody liked my vision of a paperless world, maybe, maybe, maybe.  What I do know now, is that secure PDF files are flying around the Internet from loan officer to borrowers today like nobody’s business.

I’ve also been around long enough to see paper manuals go out of style too.  And yes, I was in on the movement to push paper manuals out the door with a cool tool known as Online Help.  The great thing about Online Help is that it is not linear, it is searchable, it can be deployed via the software you are documenting, via the Internet (securely or unsecurely) or via an intranet or extranet.  I have even created help where it can be standalone on a per client computer basis.  How you deploy online help depends on many factors that I will not go into in this post, but suffice it to say you can mix and match depending on security and end-user needs.

So, in case you were wondering, Technical Writers started the green movement, it just took 10+ years for the rest of the world to catch on.

So what was your first debate or memory of going green and how long ago did you really start before the buzz word caught on?