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re: Most of it is commonsense; however, if you didn't go to school to be a
tech writer, it can be very helpful.
Yes, that's it. My company got on this bandwagon in the early eighties,
with lots of in-house training, etc. Since then it's mostly died out,
because, IMHO, of the advent of PC-based word processing and especially
choices of fonts.
The "common sense" involved mostly use of white space, in this instance by
putting paragraph titles in a left column and text in a right column. Great
for typewriters and Wangs. Now that alternate design and size and weight
(and even color) fonts are available, much of the same "look" can be
achieved using these tools. There's likely more to it today, but then the
look was the thing. And, when you "chunk" the look of documents like that,
they could accidentally get more organized. As I recall we had lots of
engineers who resisted it because it was "too informal," making we wonder at
the time if a great part of their sense of accomplishment lay in having read
poorly presented texts and coming out the other side. Probably not. The
company has done well to still be around.
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