RE: Re: Education (Was Re: Techwriting After the Boom)

["GeneK" <gene -at- genek -dot- com>]

Speaking as someone who usually has one foot planted in 
that category, I can tell you that "once upon a time" it
was considered part of the engineer's job to strip out 
the parts of a product's technical description that the
intended reader didn't need while drafting user docs.
This resulted in a lot of arguements with Marketing, 
which often seemed intent on inserting the entire patent
application description into those same user docs.
To this day, I often find myself confronting someone who
insists on inserting a long, complex "theory of operation"
into a user guide, and it's still almost always someone in
Marketing.  Most of the products I work on these days are
under the control of people called "product managers" who 
are actually in Marketing, but the engineers I work with
will hand me a mountain of data and say "okie" when I tell
them that their users aren't going to need 90% of it, 
because deep down they'd really be happiest if their stuff
didn't have to have any user docs at all.

Gene Kim-Eng


------- Original Message -------
On
Mon, 9 Jun 2003 10:55:45 -0400 ?wrote:

It's a lot like technical writing by an engineer/SME. While the explanation of
the operation to it's tiniest subcomponent certainly strokes their ego, it's
useless to the reader who want to know how to accomplish something (ie: When the
bloody race is over who wins). The user of a VCR wants to know how to record and
playback a show. They couldn't care less about electron spin.


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