RE: Respect

[<vanessa -dot- noel -at- verizon -dot- net>]

I'll have to disagree with this point:

"Since when does a user buy A instead of B because A has better
documentation?"

Recently, I've been writing a lot of Customer Case Studies (Success Stories)
for my company. Besides functionality and cost, the other selling point for
most of our customers has been the excellent documentation and code examples
provided with the product. Of course, that is gratifying to hear, but I did
not coax those comments out of the users! They were pleased with the
comprehensive docs, and chose our product over others that were
undocumented/not as well-documented.

I have not had as many troubles with respect issues, but I have heard a lot
of writers complain about them. I come from an IT background, and am a
fairly "technical" tech writer. Most s/w developers are easy enough to get
along with, if they feel that you come to them after doing some research and
have a general technical understanding. I usually load software builds on my
test machine, so that I can look at a feature before I ask any questions
about it. Other times, I just document it and ask them to review what I have
written for technical accuracy. If the feature is not yet implemented, I try
to gather as much information from functional specs and feature lists before
I talk to the developer. That is my method, and it works well for me.

Some people are just hard to get along with, so it doesn't matter what you
do, it's their problem. I am an outgoing person, so I make alliances with
various coworkers outside of the tech writing dept and that helps too. I
have had more trouble with people that think they are writers than with
developers.

Thanks for listening...
------------------
Vanessa Flint
Technical Publications
activePDF, Inc.
Mission Viejo, CA
Vanessa -at- activePDF -dot- com <mailto:Vanessa -at- activePDF -dot- com>
www.activePDF.com <http://www.activePDF.com>
"Leading the iPaper Revolution"




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