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Subject:Re: The Golden Ratio 75/25 From:David Neeley <dbneeley -at- oddpost -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 18 Sep 2003 13:58:23 -0700 (PDT)
Greetings!
I actually agree fairly well down the line with Andrew's comments--with a suggested addition:
Fiddling with formatting issues (type selection, layout questions, etc.) should consume virtually *no* time in most projects--once adequate time *has* been spent on organizational style guide decisions and creation of the appropriate templates.
(An aside...just as we develop online help systems for software products, I believe we should also have online help systems covering the various distinctive points of style previously confined to manuals. Saves MUCH time for everyone and, being convenient, is more often used).
Just as SGML was created following the observation by the DoD that mechanics were unduly confused by the plethora of organizational and stylistic differences in the various manuals included with aircraft, so too should any organization work toward a fairly uniform set of styles for the various documentation media--and when questions come up, either update the stylesheets or stick to the guidelines.
Imagine that--good stylesheets producing documents without formatting overrides that are the hallmark of *bad* stylesheets or *improperly trained writers*! The result is much simpler, faster, and easier document refresh cycles--allowing more of the time to be spent on actual research and planning, less on fiddling with making spot corrections for things that were done improperly to begin with!
Therefore, if you are *not* investing your time in new projects or major rewrites in roughly that ratio, then I think you must ask yourself why you are not doing so. Could it be that your process is so badly broken that you are having to focus on the details? (I consider dealing with inadequate legacy docs to be a process issue, since a professional documentation process should *not* put this kind of thing out to begin with!).
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