Electronic publishing for engineers (WAS: Re: Tech Writing Curriculum)

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

Iggy wrote:


>Though electronic publishing may not be an
>obvious choice for engineers, giving them the ability
>to quickly product their required documentation -
>whatever it may be - will help them be able to spend
>less time getting the writing part of their job done
>and more time on what they were ultimately hired to do
>- be an engineer.

I once worked with a large group of engineers who, because they were designing a medical device, were required to generate a great many documents. They were further challenged in that they had to do so using Interleaf, which is not kind to people who approach it casually.

Eventually I found that if I spent a few minutes getting each of these bright but writing-phobic folks to think of a document as an engineered object, their output improved dramatically. Once they got the high-level concept of what a document represents in terms of an n-dimensional information space, how a document is a tree structure, how paragraph styles signify node types, etc., they were off and running.

It didn't take a semester; it took ten minutes. Of course, for undergraduates, maybe it would take a semester.

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