Technical Communication and Training: How Similar Are They?

How similar are technical communication and training?  Although some characterize the two as nearly identical, a closer look at their occupational cultures suggests several subtle, but significant, differences exist.  

My recent article, Different Approaches to Similar Challenges: An Analysis of the Occupational Cultures of the Disciplines of Technical Communication and Training, published in the second quarter 2012 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, explores these differences.  

Here’s the abstract of the article:

Problem:  Perhaps it is presumptuous of Technical Communicators to assume that, because some of their skills that might be employed in developing and delivering training materials, that those skills alone are qualifications to work in training, much less the source by which the processes of Training might be examined.  Using data from one survey and one interview-based studies of the work of Technical Communication and Training groups, as well as participation on committees responsible for certification examinations for Technical Communicators and Trainers, this tutorial analyzes differences in the occupational cultures of the two fields.
Key Concepts:  The work differs: Technical Communicators produce content that explains how to perform tasks; trainers produce programs that develop skills that a third party can verify.  To do so, Technical Communicators follow a process that emphasizes writing and production; Trainers follow a process that emphasizes the analysis of intended goals and evaluation of whether those goals have been achieved.  The guiding philosophy of Technical Communication is usability; the guiding philosophy of Training is performance.  Although both disciplines are rooted in cognitive psychology, the primary intellectual roots of Technical Communication are in rhetoric and composition, while the primary intellectual roots are in education.  The preferred research methods of Technical Communication are critical; the preferred research methods of Trainers are empirical qualitative and quantitative methods.
Key Lessons: As a result, Technical Communication professionals and researchers who want to work in Training should approach the field in a culturally appropriate way by (1) recognizing distinctions between a communication product and a training program, (2) recognizing distinctions in work processes, (3) recognizing distinctions in language, (4) recognizing differences in values and (5) acknowledging that an academic discipline of training exists.  

To see the complete article, visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=47.  (Note: Only free to members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society and to those entering through university libraries with a subscription to IEEExplore.)

Jargon Affects Understanding of Architecture

Why Don’t We Read About Architecture? asks Allison Arieff in a recent blog post for the New York Times.

Among the many reasons she suggests (including the difficulty of bloggers about architecture to think critically with the pressure of posting as many as 5 entries per week) is language:

“Writing about architecture is like mangling language, and far too often the experience of reading architectural writing feels about as pleasurable as tooth extraction.”

She elaborates on the ways that critics make their work unbearable to read. 

Although Arieff focuses on the challenges of writing architectural criticism in a way that compels the general public, I’m reminded of the many ways that academics in my own disciplines make their research and theory inaccessible to the practicing professionals whose work the researchers want to influence.    

Check out Arieff’s post at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/why-dont-we-read-about-architecture/?hp.

Online Workshop on Writing Integrative Literature Reviews in Professional and Technical Communication

Background: To introduce the community of authors for the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication to the nature and methods for creating integrative literature reviews, we are holding a second introductory workshop.  

The first one, was a success, but many people who wanted to participate could not, because of scheduling conflicts and asked for a second session.

About the Workshop:  The goal of the workshop is to not only teach participants how to prepare an integrative literature review, but to help them start one and receive feedback on the work-in-progress (with the hope that the finished review will be submitted to the Transactions).  Some reading before the first four class sessions; research occurs in the gap between the fourth and fifth session and participants prepare an early draft before the sixth session. 

The workshop leader is Saul Carliner, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Director of the Education Doctoral Program and Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, and a past recipient of back-to-back Frank R. Smith Awards for Best Article in the peer-reviewed journal, Technical Communication. 

Who Should Attend:  Faculty, Researchers, PhD students, and advanced master’s students (who have completed a research methodology class) in Technical and Professional Communication or a Related Field.  

Schedule:  The next 6-session workshop is scheduled:

Thursday, April 26  11 AM – 12:15 pm Eastern

Thursday, May 3, 11 AM – 12:15 pm Eastern

Thursday, May 10, 11 AM – 12:15 pm Eastern

Thursday, May 17, 11 AM – 12:15 pm Eastern

Thursday, June 7, 11 AM – 12:15 pm Eastern 

Thursday, June 28, 11 AM – 12:15 pm Eastern

Location:  Webinar using Adobe Connect.  

You’ll need a computer with a live internet connection at the time of the class.  (Sessions are not recorded.)

Fee:  No cost, but a commitment to (a) preparing a draft of a literature review during the course of the workshop and (b) submitting a completed integrative literature review to the Transactions for consideration within 9 months of the completion of the seminar.   

To enroll or receive more information:  Contact David Price, Editorial Assistant, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication: tpc.editorial@gmail.com.

What does the Transactions Publish? What do Transactions’ Readers want to read?

Check out What does the Transactions Publish? What do Transactions’ Readers Want to Read?,, which I co-wrote with Nancy Coppola, George Hayhoe, and Helen Grady and was recently published in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

In the process of exploring what readers want, this article also characterizes the state of the material published in the peer-reviewed literature on technical communication.

As the abstract of the article notes:  

Research Problem: The change in editorship of the Transactions on Professional Communication provides an opportunity for investigate the match between the content published by the journal and the content sought by its readers and to assess the uniqueness of the niche that it fills among peer-reviewed journals on professional and technical communication.
Research Questions: What content does the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication publish? How does that compare to the content published by other journals in the field? And what content do readers of the Transactions want to read?
Literature Review: Researchers in most fields occasionally analyze the entire body of literature within their disciplines as a result of a particular request or a research initiative.  The general purpose of these analyses is to assess the current state of the literature, although each analysis usually has a more specific focus that affects the entire field it covers.  Such reviews have had goals like identifying the leading works in a field, assessing the state of the literature of the field, providing a basis for changing the direction of a journal or body of literature, and assessing the alignment among different parts of  a body of literature. This study is rooted in a particular study intended to prepare for a transition among editors of a journal. 
Methodology: To identify what the Transactions publishes and its unique niche among peer-reviewed journals in the field, researchers identified all peer-reviewed articles published by four major journals in professional and technical communication between January 2006 and December 2010: the Transactions, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly. Using the STC Body of Knowledge schema, two researchers coded the subjects of articles and adapting a schema by Klein (1999), they categorized the type of research underlying the articles.  To identify reader preferences, the other two researchers surveyed members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society (publisher of the Transactions) about their preferences for content and types of research (using the same schema).
Results and Discussion: The studies provide insights into the extent of alignment between  the material published by the Transactions on Professional Communication and the preferences of its readers on the types of topics covered and the methods used to generate them.  

To see the complete article, visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=47.  (Note: Only free to members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society and to those entering through university libraries with a subscription to IEEExplore.)

User-Generated Documentation 

One trend that garners the attention of many instructional designers and  technical communicators is that of content generated by people other than us.  We typically face two major competitors to our work:  

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), whose have an in-depth knowledge of the content and save time on translating it for communicators by writing the material themselves 

Users and learners, who have hands-on experience with the content and can offer real-world perspectives on ways that people actually use the content in the context of their jobs and lives

For the purpose of this article, I'll refer to contributions by both groups as user-generated documentation, even though the technical term for the first category is SME-generated documentation. 

Like many technical writers, Malobika Khanra and Debarshi Gupta Biswas 

authors of User-Generated Content: Embracing Social Networking to Deliver More Engaging Technical Documentation,   (UX Matters, 

http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/04/user-generated-content-embracing-social-networking-to-deliver-more-engaging-technical-documentation.php). 

primarily focus on the advantages of user-generated documentation, noting that it is an inevitable byproduct of a Web 2.0 world, democratizes content and offers broader perspectives on the content than possible by technical communicators alone.  They note that technical communicators still play a role in publishing user-generated content, calling that role a content curator. 

One of the tools for producing user-generated content is the template, which guides users through the process of preparing content on their own.  In Are You Tempted to Use a Template to Expedite Policy & Procedure Development (http://www.urgoconsulting.com/enewsletter/2011_Nov-Dec/template-policy-and-procedure-development.php), policies and procedures expert Raymond Urgo distinguishes among the different types of templates available:

Content, which presents a fill-in-the-blank form that not only addresses formatting issues, but also prompts authors to provide particular types of content in a particular order--and use  particular headings to signal that content to readers.  

Mechanical, which primarily assists with formatting.

Pre-written, which contains most of the text needed on a particular topic, prompting users to replace certain types of things.

Urgo notes that none of these templates guide their users through the foundational process of analyzing users and their needs and, as a result, using these templates might speed up the production of content, but the content might fail to actually meet the needs of its intended users. 

This problem of analysis is also raised by Khanra and Biswas, who note that instructional designers and technical communicators often do not conduct a full audience analysis.  

The same pressures driving people to use templates are the ones presumed to prevent instructional designers and technical communicators from conducting audience analyses:  pressures to reduce costs and time to publication.  

But in many cases, the problem is more fundamental.  In some organizations, instructional designers and technical communicators are actively prevented from gaining access to users; only marketing representatives and a few select members of the product development team have such access.  

Worse, when confronted with such situations, instructional designers and technical communicators merely complain that they don't have It's that someone actively prevents access to users.  They don't push to gain access or, at the least, to talk directly to those people who do have access.  

For example, I once had a student--a professional technical communicator--who was supposed to do an audience analysis in her work environment for her class project.  She said she could not do so because her company prevented it.  I said that she should then speak to the people who do have access to users to get this information; previously she relied solely on product specifications and internal marketing plans for information.

She did so--and the experience was enlightening.  The documentation on which she relied was misleading; they described the intended markets and users for her products.  After speaking with the people who had direct access to users, she learned that the primary audience assumed for the product was actually a secondary one, the group assumed to be a secondary audience was merely a tiny population, and that the primary market was one that was not even on her radar.  

User-generated content has its value, but it is not vetted content.  

That vetting is the value added by instructional designers and technical communicators.  But we don't bring much value unless we truly do the vetting--and push to gain the broad, practical perspective that SMEs lack because of technical focus, and users lack because of their one-environment-only focus.  

Perhaps the best advantage of user-generated documentation is that it keeps us on our toes.  

We Don't Pay--Technically

In his New York Times article, Paying for News? It’s Nothing New, Jeremy W. Peters shattered my belief that major news outlets don’t pay for interviews.

In the most technical sense, major news outlets don’t. But they provide various types of expense reimbursements in exchange for an interview. As Peters notes:

The payment is always for something else, tangible or intangible, like one’s time or the rights to memorabilia.

So what’s the difference between paying for a picture or paying for the interview? The money ends up in the interviewees hands.

Peters also notes that this practice has existed in one form or another for over a century—citing an example of his own paper paying a survivor of the Titanic.

Maybe the real issue is not paying for interviews but the guideline of not paying for interviews isn’t realistic. Major news outlets can’t seem to follow the intent of their own guidelines, even if they have met the guideline in its most technical sense.

Read Peters’ analysis at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/sunday-review/paying-for-news-its-nothing-new.html?pagewanted=all

Looks like it's really going to happen!

Just finished reviewing the edits for my next book, Informal Learning Basics.

Comes out this spring.

Updates and teasers as publication gets closer.

Textbooks to Train Your Staff

On my blog for technical communication and training managers, I've posted some thoughts about books to train new technical communicators.

Check out the list at http://tcmanager.blogspot.com/2011/03/textbooks-to-train-your-staff.html

And please feel free to contribute additions to the list.

The Travel Experience on Subways

Rail basically lives up to its reputation as a “more civilized” way of travel—and so does its “cousin,” subways (also known as metros and mass transit).  Perfect? No.  Travel by mass transit posed some interesting challenges, like these.

My first experience on the Madrid Metro was an experience in getting lost. Totally lost.  Admittedly, it was partly my fault; I didn’t call the hotel in advance to find out which Metro stop to take, much less write down its address and telephone number.  But the hotel shares some of the blame; it did not list the actual name of the Metro stop on its website, much less the name of the specific exit to take.

My first indication of a problem was at the train station.  I went to the information desk to get information about the Metro system.  The guy at the desk said he worked for the rail system, not the metro.

We made it to the presumed subway station and discovered it had 5 exits.  We didn’t know which one to take, and couldn’t find an area guide on the walls that might suggest which of the five was most appropriate for us.  I chose one; I quickly learned that wasn’t the right one.   I learned two valuable lessons from that experience; useful, tourist-oriented signage is an essential component of a great Metro.  In the meantime, make sure you have thorough directions.

Déjà vu all over again in Berlin.   I had traveled on the Berlin subway system before, so I felt comfortable using it this time.  It’s extensive, it goes nearly everywhere we wanted to go (except directly to Museum Island) and runs on an honor system (there are no turnstiles to go through).

So I wasn’t prepared for a bizarre situation that happened my first time using the subway on this trip.  After the fifth station, the sixth stop on the line was the same as the fourth stop.  And the seventh station was the same as the third stop.  According to the map on the train, that wasn’t the plan.

Apparently, part of the line on which I was traveling was closed for renovations.  There was an announcement on the train but, because it was in German, I couldn’t understand it.  I learned a valuable lesson from this experience: when lines are interrupted or stations closed for renovations, place a temporary marker on the subway map over the area to provide a visual cue to passengers. Also update the website with similar information.

That said, I found the subway maps for the Berlin metro to be unusually complicated and difficult to follow in contrast to systems of similar size and complexity.  This system has many routes, but the small type on the route maps made identifying route and station names all the more challenging.  Directional signage within stations was similarly confusing.  For example, no direct link exists between the S-bahn and U-bahn trains though directional   signage in the station suggests otherwise.  .

The City Tour in Istanbul:  Istanbul has both traditional subway and light rail systems.  We found both systems to be incredibly easy to use.

Travelers buy tokens (called jetons) from a vendor near the station, then enter the station.  The system was reasonably bi-lingual; visitors who do not speak or read Turkish could easily navigate the system.

Although cities primarily build mass transit systems to ferry locals through the city, we figured out quickly that an above-ground system, like the Light Rail system in Istanbul, could also provide tourists a great tour of the city, too.  So we rode the line end-to-end, traveling from the downtown of the city to a suburb near the airport, and back to the historic section where we were staying.  We took the ride at sunset and traveled over the river--certainly adding to the charm of the experience.  

In general, we found travel by mass transit in all of the cities we visited to be exceptionally convenient and cost-effective when walking was either not practical or not reflective of our moods.  Admittedly, signage and directions posed challenges in some cities.  But in each case, we quickly overcame the challenges, adjusted to the systems, and became regular users. We purchased unlimited travel passes on the Paris and Berlin systems.  We did not need the passes in other cities but used the systems when walking or city tour buses could not take us where we wanted to go.  

Next post:  Wish lists of cultural resources for my home towns. 

Travel Pet Peeves

Although I learned a lot from my travels, a lot of things bothered me while I was on the road.   


In this posting, I describe some of the little everyday things that irritated me. In the next several posts, I explore some of the systemic issues—specifically, the usability of airports, train stations, and metro systems.  

• Musicians on the Metro (as opposed to those in the Metro station, who usually have to go through an audition process).  Just as I would get into a meaningful conversation with my partner, or go into a deep thought, a not so quiet-nor-comforting concert (I’d hardly call it a serenade) would start.  Something upbeat, with an accordion or something similarly loud.   
• Panhandlers on the Metro.  They walk from car to car, cup in hand, yelling at people or parading disabled relatives, in a bid for passengers’ money.  Perhaps my irritation is cultural; in Atlanta—where I lived for a decade—the city has posted signs throughout the city advising people not to support panhandlers.  In contrast, the Parisians seem quite supportive of their panhandlers.  I felt bad for those on the train from the airport to the center of the city; most were stingy tourists like me. 
• Panhandlers in McDonald’s and Starbucks.  Same as on the Metro, but in a more stationary location.  One tried to hit us up just as we were sitting down to eat at McDonald’s.   
• Street signage—or lack thereof.  The older the city, the more invisible the signage, and the more challenging the task of finding a destination.  
• Mis-directions from locals.  Although well-intentioned, they’re often inaccurate.  For example, someone told me, “The metro station is just 5 minutes from here.”  I’m sure it was 5 minutes from here, but a different “here” than where we were.  In another place, someone said, “It’s just one block to the Metro.”  Then how do they explain the other two blocks?   
• Internet access fees in European hotels.  They’re over twice as expensive as in the few North American hotels that still charge for Internet access.  But at least the better hotels explain their fees.  One hotel failed to mention it, then tried to stick me with a 65 euro bill when we checked out.  
• Texting everywhere.  What’s annoying is that it slows people down when they walk, and they block the walkway.  
• People who have to yammer on their cell phones in a plane up until the minute the flight attendant announces that they must be turned off.  One time, I had to listen to some guy talking to his kid in graphic detail about her stomach ache.  
• People who have to yammer on their cell phones on a plane the second the flight attendant says that they can be used again.  It’s especially bizarre on cross-country, red eye flights that arrive on the east coast at 5:30 or 6 am.  Who’s awake to take the call?  
• People who yammer on their hand-held cell phones when they drive.  Even if they weren’t putting the safety of others at risk, on highways, they usually drive about 15 to 25 km slower than all of the other traffic, and selfishly cause traffic to back up.  
• People who text and drive.  One can look at the road or look at the screen of their phone, but it’s hard to do both at once.
• The lack of public information campaigns about talking on hand-helds, texting, and driving in states and provinces that have supposedly outlawed them.  As drivers need to be reminded about the speed limit, they also benefit from occasional reminders about the local mobile phone laws.  

My biggest pet peeve?  The way that traveling makes all of us irritable people who become so focused on our pet peeves, we forget the amazing opportunities that we’ve been given to see new places, meet new people, experience other cultures and, most significantly, stay in touch with people who would have otherwise left our lives.  


It's a situation in which the user experience is overlooked by everyone except the user, because the problems occur--as Rummler and Brache observe--in the "white space" between organizations.  Or more specifically, the black hole that's "not my fault" but isn't anyone else's either.  The next several posts explore three specific travel experiences that are ridden with black holes: airports, trains, and subways.  

Next post:  The Usability of Airports and Planes.  

The News in Spain

Although, with the Internet, it’s easy to ignore local media when travelling, we tried to follow the local news on television when possible during our travels.  To be honest, I was primarily locked into English language outlets because of my language limitations (and, to a lesser extent, Spanish ones).    So I can’t say I watched the same news that the locals watched. 

But the English language news isn’t the same that we get in North America.  And, unlike Hong Kong, we didn’t receive re-transmissions of the American ABC, CBS, and NBC network newscasts. CNN international was available in nearly every hotel we visited, BBC World Service in most, and a English language European network.  In addition, the French pubcaster has a 24-hour English language newscast. 

In watching these different outlets, I observed the following:

·         The number of announcers and reporters with North American accents was surprisingly high, even on European-based channels.  I expected more British accents. 

·         The networks emphasize a different mix of international stories and give them different weights.  For example, the story of falsified passports used by the alleged accomplices in a Dubai murder was a top story on most of the European stations while it seemed to be a buried story in the American press (based on coverage in the New York Times and the Globe and Mail at the same time). 

·         Similarly, a story about the arrest of several Turkish generals was a top story in Europe and did not seem to receive as much coverage in the North American press.  (That these arrests happened within a week or so of our visit to Turkey admittedly heightened our sensitivity to this issue.)

·         European weather disasters were covered widely, as were American weather disasters.  What I find striking is that, while Europeans cover American weather disasters, American news outlets are not as quick to cover European weather disasters.

·         European news outlets also cover news of Africa, a topic that’s all but forgotten by most North American press. 

·         CNN International is not the same CNN as the one we see in the US and Canada.  Rather than obsessing with small talk and one or two sensational stories that were first covered by Fox, CNN International generally reports a wide variety of real news from places other than the US.  Although some of the annoying personality-based journalism that’s creeped into CNN in the past few years is on display on CNNi (as it’s called) (“Backstory” is an exceptionally annoying example), the network seems to cover a greater breadth of stories and countries. 

In a way, the situation reminds me of the two solitudes view of Canada, a country where language divides end up altering world views, because we listen to different radio and music, watch different television series, read different books  and, most significantly,  hear different news. 

Next post: The Excitement Still Lives in the Department Stores of Europe and Peru

Reflections on Museums 1: Tour Buses, Advance Organizers, and Truth in Organizational Communication

The next several posts reflect on the experience of visiting museums.  The first explores tour buses, advance organizers and truth in organizational communication.

Subsequent postings explore:

• The cost of museums
• How visitors learn from museum exhibits
• Lessons for information architecture from museums
• The challenges of displaying difficult material

Reflections on Museums 1: Tour Buses, Advance Organizers, and Truth in Organizational Communication
One of the more interesting surprises of my recent visit to Europe was my discovery of the city tour—you know, those double-decker buses that drive around a city and point out the sites to people.

In the past, I had never seen the point to them.  I always felt that the history museum for the city was the ideal launching pad for a visit.  These museums describe how the city evolved and, in the process, introduce the culture, key places, and famous people.  Indeed, some even have replicas, models, paintings, or photos of major places, along with statues, paintings and photos of famous people. I’m still a fan of these institutions as a starting point for a visit.  For example, if you’re visiting Montreal, make sure you check out the Montreal History Centre.  Visiting Atlanta?  Check out the Atlanta History Center.  Chicago? Check out the Chicago Historical Society.  Berlin? The Berlin Story.

But these institutions admittedly have a few limitations as a starting point for a visit. Some cities don’t really have such institutions.  For example, Toronto doesn’t. (They’ve talked about it, but so far, nothing’s there.)  Baltimore’s City Life museums served such a purpose but went bankrupt, and the one city museum—the one-of-a-kind Public Works museum—closed as part of a budget cut.  (The Maryland Historical Society fills in some of the slack.)

So what’s a visitor to do?

Take my partner’s advice and take the tour bus. At first, it was something for him to kill time when I had to finish a report during our visit to Istanbul. He loved the experience.  I thought it was just about the chance to ride on the open, upper deck of a double-decker bus (no selling point to this cold-adverse person).  But he said it gave him a sense of the layout of the city, and he appreciated the background provided by the tour guide.

He also appreciated the flexibility of European city tours. All are hop on—hop off, which let visitors get on and off.  If a site intrigues a visitor, the visitor can get off the bus and explore the site, then resume the tour.

He loved the experience so much that, by the third city, he would ask, “When am I going to be able to take my tour bus?”

But along the way, he talked me into trying the tour bus, too.  And I found that, like the guided tours of a software applications for new users, or that museums post on their websites, these tour buses act as advance organizers (like those Ausubel proposes for educational programs) for experiencing a new city.  Most, though not all, tours provided visitors with a brief history of the city—starting with its founding, introduced the major sections of the city (and, in some cases, put it into the context of its history), and then introduced major sites.

Some are sites that visitors are likely to explore later, like museums and historic locations; others are curiosities, like the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, a building so unique in its shape and size that only the least curious visitor could ignore it (though it is not really a tourist site).

I also learned a few practical things along the way—some that merely prepare me better for future tours, others that inform work in information and instructional design.

• As a result of having no cover and being above the traffic, the views on the upper level were much clearer than those on the lower level . Or, to be more precise, although I may have been warm on the covered and somewhat heated lower deck of the bus, I couldn’t’ see much. 
• Most tours operate in several languages (one operated in as many as ten).  To do so, most use a system that lets visitors choose the language of choice.  
• To make sure that the right narration plays at the right time, the default narration is music.  Although I am not certain of this, it seems that the buses and the key sites are equipped with some sort of technology that tells the bus when it’s entering a particular district; that, in turn, causes the system to play the recording associated with that location.  The system seems to experience glitches when a bus is idling near a signal; the same narration plays repeatedly until the bus moves away from the signal.  (This was a problem in Madrid.)  
• Some aspects of consistency are overlooked.  All of the Spanish cities had at least two bus routes and they slightly overlapped.  In Barcelona, the English narration for one route was by someone with an American accent; the other by someone with a British accent.  But in the overlapping part of the routes, the system only had one recording.  The sudden change from an American to  British voice seemed a bit odd.  
• As an added benefit to these systems, the tour companies provide a set of high quality ear phones that visitors can keep.  As someone who goes through 3 or 4 sets of earphones a year, this was an added bonus, worth $8 to $10 per tour.  
• The tour bus we took in Berlin was the exception to these tours; we had a live tour guide who narrated in both German and English. Even though I was the only Anglophone for part of the tour, he continued to narrate in both languages.  And he even translated the jokes!
• This live narration, complete with opinion, provided for a more colorful tour—not just in terms of the jokes, but also the opinions.  While providing opinion admittedly risks offending the audience, the absence of some admittedly less-than-pleasant facts can also make a tour seem unnecessarily sanitized.  For example, when pointing out the Department of Defense headquarters in Madrid,  the narrator of the tour bus noted that construction started in 1932 but wasn’t finished for two decades afterwards.  He failed to mention that the country was embroiled in a civil war during those years and the capital was temporarily moved away from Madrid, which might have had an effect on construction. 
• Professional organizational communicators often wonder what to do about similar situations.  This just reinforces my belief that it’s important to address the “big box in the middle of the room.”  Ignoring it does not make the issue go away.  Instead, people are likely to fill in the blanks.  Sometimes, they’ll do so knowledgeably (even if they have a different viewpoint than the organization would prefer).  More often than not, something will seem weird and they’ll make up their own explanation—complete or not, accurate or not. By acknowledging and explaining the situation, the communicator is allowed to address the situation in a way that’s to their benefit.  (Kind of what everyone recommended that Tiger Woods should have done when his scandal first broke, but that’s another story.)

Next post:  What Museums Cost Visitors.