radical revamping of techpubs

[Chris Borokowski]

I agree, and if there's one reason many people think technical writing
has a bad name, it's this. The churned-out documentation where the
writer is left with so little time and support they create a
transcription of the obvious, with little informational content or
sense of how they can make the users relax and understand the
application on a power user level.

Most of the documentation I read is so horrible it's beyond conception,
but I think that this mentality of showing up late and churning out the
manual, which I call WTFM, is at fault, not necessarily the writer. (I
have to add that in many cases, people who are not writers are pressed
into service as writers, and their dislike of that situation causes
more problems than their level of talent and education for it.)

--- Rene Stephenson <rinnie1 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> And that's exactly why so much of the documentation is
> frustrating for the customer to use. You can't generate technically
> correct content that is usable and well-planned and free of glaring
> typos and grammatical errors when you are only given an average of 30
> minutes per page of output. 

http://technical-writing.dionysius.com/
technical writing | consulting | development

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