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Unfortunately, there is still a hell of a lot of
technical writing going on that is "function based,"
rather than "task based." This seems to be especially
common in the software world. In hardware, where
I've spent most of my working life, if you wrote
instructions for a transmission or a jet engine that
identified what every component did but not how to
install, adjust, operate and maintain it you'd be
sent packing, but there's an enormous amount of SW
documentation that tells you what every button and
field does but not how to get anything done with them.
I rencently attended a local publication manager's
forum where (surprise, surprise) the discussion of
the day was offshoring. One attendee opined that
tech writing overseas was still behind writing in
the US because "their" writers were still doing
function-based writing and hadn't learned to base
user docs on tasks, "the way we've learned to in
the US." My first thought on hearing that was,
"I must not have been on distribution for the email
announcement on that one."
Gene Kim-Eng
------- Original Message -------
On Fri, 30 Apr 2004 11:10:22 -0700 (PDT) David Neeley wrote:
Of course, few tech docs today seem to be well indexed--so finding pertinent help is a great challenge in many manuals. Online help can be just as bad...my own frustration with most of it has been to spend considerable time in finding the topic, only to discover that the online help system confidently *says* the program will do what I've been searching for, but rarely gives actual instructions on *how* to do it.
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