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As a couple of responses have already mentioned. Present the procedure as a
stand alone procedure. Provide all of the descriptive information, either in
its own chapter, say Description or Reference. Then present your procedures,
however many there may be, in some logical presentation, say how a typical
user might use them. Provide references to the Description/Reference
sections so that the user can easily find the in-depth information that they
_might_ need, and you hope they don't because the procedures are written
with enough information to get the task completed and not have to refer to
the Description/Reference section.
-----Original Message-----
From: Lulu TW [mailto:lulutw -at- hotmail -dot- com]
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 4:52 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Basic structure question
Hi all,
I'm returning to tech writing after a sabbatical, and although I'm finding
that most of the necessary info is still lodged somewhere in the grey
matter, I'm having problems with a basic structuring issue.
The problem is this:
I'm writing an Admin Guide, and one section is wholly taken up with creating
an object. Now, to create this object, you just open a tool, select the
object, and the object creation dialog box appears. In this dialog box,
there's 13 different property fields to be set...but, explaining each
property involves major discussion of what it is, whjat it does, how to
manage it etc (going up to five or six pages worth of description in some
cases). So...I'm wondering whether to describe and explain each property
separetly first before explaining the object creation procedure, or whether
to describe and explain each property sequentially as it is displayed in the
object creation dialog box, with all the interruptions to the object
creation procedure that this would involve.
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