What is a good short description for a task?

Some of the short descriptions indicated as "good" in the class assignments simply restated information that was in the short description of the related concept. The task's short description may have been written differently and in the imperative, but it was redundant information.

If you're looking at a list of short descriptions, like in the parent topic in a CHM output or in a list of search results, you may want to know which topic contain the steps. If the title or short description doesn't say something like "how to" or "follow these steps," users just have to figure out your naming conventions to pick the right topic.

Much of our information will end up in a knowledgebase. If naming conventions are to be meaningful, all KB contributors need to use them. I doubt ours will. They're mostly volunteers, not professional writers or support staff. So we can't count on all content following the same conventions.

Further, pretty much everything we write is translated. Using semantic differences in titles to distinguish different types of topics doesn't always work. I don't know enough of the languages to know if it's simply because that language can't make the distinctions as clearly as English or if the translators weren't consistent or weren't provided with enough instruction.