Re: Software solution (tech writing tie in)

[Chris Gooch <Chris -at- lightwork -dot- co -dot- uk>]

Arlen.P.Walker writes:

>Chris is right, there is an important TW tie-in over this. But it may not
>be what he thinks.

Not that I disagree with Arlen's well made point about the complexity that
creeps into
things over the years, but the point I was trying to make seems to have been
lost
as it triggered Windows-phile's hot-buttons. Sorry - as I say I use both
Windows and
Unix every day, and they each have their good and bad points.

Here's another situation which might make my point better; when I was first
learning
to drive, I had trouble with clutch control on hill starts (hill starts are
important in
Sheffield!). My instructor tried to explain to me that I needed to use my
left foot
to "catch the car and balance it - the steeper the hill the more the car
weighs
and so the balance on your left foot needs to change". Or something like
that.
I didn't understand a word (I think I know what he was getting at now - it
does
sort of *feel* like that) and struggled.

Anyway the three lessons my parents bought me as a 17th birthday present
were
used up and I was nowhere near passing my test. A year later when I had
enough
money to afford a longer course of lessons, my new instructor explained the
operation
of the clutch pedal in a different way --- he explained how a clutch works.
When you
press the clutch all the way in the engine is disconnected from the drive
wheels,
when you let it out all the way the two clutch plates are clamped together
so the
engine turns the wheels, and when you find the biting point the two clutch
plates
are pressed together just firmly enough for the spinning plate to keep the
other
plate still - so your drive wheels stay steady despite being on a hill.

Hey presto, I could then visualise what was happening and drive the car.

So, there are times when metaphor and task based or context based
explanations are not the best ways to explain things. Sometimes it is
appropriate to say "this is a thing, it works like this, the reason it works
like this is because it's made of stuff", rather than "to do a hill start
depress the accelerator pedal 5cm and the clutch pedal 20cm, release
the hand brake and gradually pull back your left foot - don't ask why
it just works".

Further disclaimer -- I'm not saying such an approach is always, or mostly
appropriate - different subjects and different audiences will demand
different, and probably overlapping approaches. It just seems to me that
a lot of software documentation suffers from only giving task based
information, rather than how things work. For example I constantly
struggle with bulleted/enumerated lists in MS Word - as soon as you
have more than one level (list within list) it all seems to go wrong. The
help documentation only explains things in the "to do bullets, click on
blah blah" sort of way. I'd *much* prefer some explanation of what on
earth Word thinks it is doing behind the scenes so that I can work out
how to make it do what I want it to do.

Cheers,
Chris.

Christopher Gooch, Technical Author
LightWork Design Ltd, Sheffield, England.
chris -at- lightwork -dot- co -dot- uk   www.lightwork.com



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