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Understanding code may be useful to many of us working in software shops,
but it's not a real test of our *technical* communication skills. Take this
excerpt from one of our white pages:
"CCM uses a single logical core file. A dynamic hashing scheme (automatic
modulus expansion and contraction) is used for persistent record storage.
The hashing scheme is similar to the public domain UNIX library, "sdbm",
which uses an amalgam of dynamic/linear hashing. A stored record is rapidly
located by hashing the record key, yielding the offset frame address in
which the record is located. If the record is larger than the frame size
itself, additional overflow frames are chained together to store the
complete record...."
We've got megabytes of this type of text, which was originally written by
our chief scientist. When I want to use all or part of this text for my own
purposes, or if I need to rewrite the same information myself to put into
the SDK, I'd better have a general idea of what it's saying--and more
important, what this will mean to the readers (who do understand it).
Otherwise my job gets reduced to recycling the chief scientists words, maybe
a little editing for grammar and clarification, and probably totally
changing crucial meaning along the way.
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TECH*COMM 2001 Conference, July 15-18 in Washington, DC
The Help Technology Conference, August 21-24 in Boston, MA
Details and online registration at http://www.SolutionsEvents.com
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