radical revamping of techpubs

[Leslie H Schwartz]

They will get exactly what they desirve - a complete disaster.

Companies that do not know the value of technical documentation, user documentation, in what ever form it is needed will lose business and market share, in the same way that companies that move their customer service call centers off shore lose business because of customer dissatisfaction with that quality of support.

Technical documentation is something that many managers or owners of business think they can cut corners and save money on, but very often that leads to lower quality and lower levels of customer satisfaction.

And software enginers have a great set os skills to offer, but technical wirting usually isn't one of them they know the software innards but that does not mean they know how to create a user document. And you suggested that English was a second language for them; when the users get that ESL document, they are not going to be happy, and likey the first thing they will think is that they probably made a mistake to purchase that product at all; presuming they had a choice -since so much of US industry has been moved off shore. So people don't have much of a choice now, but that does not mean they are happy about it. I know I'm not.

So obviously this was a very loaded question, I would think most technical writers based in a market would have the same conclusions I do about the scenario.



----- Original Message ----
From: mulholland4 <mulholland4 at gmail.com>
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 2:54:37 PM
Subject: radical revamping of techpubs


Hi,
I would like to see what the group thinks of this scenario for writing
documentation within a company?

1. Remove all existing tech writing staff from techpubs.
2. Replace these with software developers and specialists who know the
software inside out and get them to write all of the documentation. These
would now be known as Developer-techwriters. (It should be noted that none
of these people has English as a first language, despite this being the
primary market for the documentation.)
3. Hire editing staff to edit only the language and grammar of the documents
written by the software specialists.

The reasoning behind this scenario is; that this saves money as the
developers know the software, and it is really cheap to get university
students to come in and edit.

I won't make comments on this just now as i'm sure there are many of us who
just want to run screaming!

thanks
Mulholland
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