Re: [libreoffice-users] Paragraph styles

Hello Virgil,

This is a very interesting thread you're opening and I'm glad to "meet" 
people having the very same concerns I've got for years.

Le 29/04/2013 20:00, Virgil Arrington a écrit :
> I'd like to get some general opinions about paragraph styles.
>
> I am a retired lawyer who led a local government law office. When I was
> working at that office, I tried in vain to get my employees to use
> paragraph styles. For them, styles were a bother to set up and maintain.
> I love using them, but then I'm as much a word processor junkie as I am
> an end-user.
>
> Now, I teach a paralegal course in technology at my local university. I
> recently spent three weeks teaching styles to my students and they have
> resisted me all the way. My sense is that people just trying to get
> their work done see paragraph styles as an nuisance, not appreciating
> the amount of time they can save by investing a little at the beginning.
>
> What about the rest of you. Do you use styles? Do you find that other
> less-techy types avoid them?

I'm on that side as well. But my feeling is that you won't teach 
efficiently about styles to *end-users* if they don't get correctly 
crafted templates from the very beginning.

IOW, there are two sides to word-processors use: the writer side, on 
which most the users are, and the conception side where lies a very 
small crowd. IMO, only the latter need a deep knowledge about styles and 
templates. The formers only need (at first) to *use* the templates that 
are provided to them by conceptors. This way, they only have to bother 
to they actual job: writing. When they are used to the concepts and can 
see them at work on a daily basis, then the writers can grab the 
knowledge. Not at first.

Well, this is the way I think things should be set in any organisation.

I guess much of your failures wrt styles training are because you're 
trying to teach a technique that is way beyond the common user's needs 
and which requires a very steep learning curve (BTDTGTTS). This means 
that my way of training is template-centered: teach the basics of 
word-processing (3 hrs), then teach to use the template-s (1-3 hrs per 
template depending upon its complexity). Styles have to be shown and 
explained but through the template uses. One thing is: when a writer can 
use a correctly crafted template, s-he can use any template. The 
difficult part being to design a "correct" template.


As a summary, I'd say that the tool is a two-sided one, neither side 
being independant:

-> The tool is the software *and* the template.


My 2 euro-cents,
--
Jean-Francois Nifenecker, Bordeaux

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