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On 19 Nov 2002, at 19:23, Mike Stockman wrote:
"I would expect most good programmers to also be good at writing."
Huh - what planet do you live on?
:-)
Seriously, I would hate to generalize about programmers (or any other
group) either positively or negatively about their writing ability. But
I recently gave a talk about writing documentation for developers (which
I do full time) and tried to make the point, somewhat tongue-in-cheek,
that programmers are from another planet. They are concerned about (and
good at) code, objects, modules, classes, functions, etc. As tech
writers, we are concerned about language, content, words, documents,
clarity, presentation, etc.
The two professions are therefore very different - to expect or assume
that programmers (even "good" ones) would be good at programming is
nonsense. I review their raw documents (which I have to repair) almost
daily - most of them are in pretty sad shape. That's not their fault -
it's just that they are paid to be programmers, and not writers. That's
my job.
Andrew Brooke
abrooke -at- advancedutility -dot- com
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