Stop Reuse Abuse

Presentation Abstract

The ability to reuse content is a common justification for moving to DITA. Often in efforts to meet a random reuse percentage, however, organizations take reuse to an extreme. While certainly reuse can bring consistency to the user and translation savings to the company, if those benefits are outweighed by the time required by an author to both implement and maintain the content moving forward, are they really benefits? Over the years, Dawn has seen some truly innovative reuse implementations that technically worked, but that failed to help companies realize the benefits they were hoping for. These implementations failed to consider issues such as reuse granularity, amount of reuse in a single file, appropriate use of each reuse mechanism, and the likelihood of change. Join Dawn as she explores common reuse abuse cases and presents guidelines for stopping these abuses from continuing.

Meet the Presenter


Dawn Stevens is the President, and owner of Comtech Services and the Director of the Center for Information-Development Management. With over 25 years of experience, including 15 years at Comtech, Dawn has practical experience in virtually every role within a documentation and training department, including project management, instructional design, writing, editing, and multimedia programming. With both engineering and technical communication degrees, Dawn combines a solid technical foundation with strong writing and design skills to identify and remove the challenges her clients face in producing usable, technical information and training.

Return to Agenda