How to Organize Information the LATCH Way

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Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Like any career, technical writing also has its mechanical aspects and one needs to master them well. A technical communicator must have a good command both over the language and various software products.

But I wish that was all there is to know about technical writing. The most difficult part involves what goes on before one even sits down in front of a computer to type the first word.

Organizing and presenting the information in a way that makes sense is our main challenge. Otherwise a technical document would be of no use at all.

If you are writing a cooking manual, are you going to organize it in terms of national cuisines?

Or are you going to present the software information in terms of its cost and different payment packages?

If you are writing a manual about dogs, are you going to introduce them according to their size, country of origin, temperament, or what?

Richard Saul Wurman, a legendary technical communicator who has written extensively about the issue, has introduced the LATCH method, an acronym made up of the first letters of the following 5 information organization principles:

1) Location
2) Alphabet
3) Time
4) Category
5) Hierarchy

Wurman claims that ANY INFORMATION can be categorized neatly along these 5 dimensions and he may be right about that. This is a super tool to organize and present information in any subject matter in an intelligent manner.

For example, if you’re writing a City Guide, you can of course use L (Location) easily and divide the guide into districts, neighborhoods, etc.

Once you do that, you can switch to T (Time) perhaps and talk about what is “old and historic” and what’s “brand new” in every location.

How about C (Category)? “Pre-WW2″ versus “Post-WW2″? Or “Historic” versus “Modern”?

As one can image, the possibilities are vast of course.

LATCH dimensions are powerful tools to organize information for any technical document or book.

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