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Quoting TechComm Dood <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>:
> How so? I've found the experience/act of writing has changed
> drastically moving from a "one long song" approach to a
> "single-sourced/info mapped/insert buzzword here" approach.
Writing comes down to three main tasks:
- Gathering information
- Structuring the information
- Expressing the information
Each of these tasks varies in detail. In gathering, I've used hands-on
experience, interviews, and even what I call forensic tech-writing - that is,
digging through old e-mails. For structuring I may use one long book or
single-screen help topics. For expressing, I've used Plain English to pure
tech-speak.
However, each task requires making decisions about what suits the material, your
audience, and your purposes. I suggest that this decision-making is what writing
is about. The exact choices are not nearly as important as the process itself.
Naturally, the choices must be appropriate to the circumstances - that's the
definition of good writing. But what makes writing writing is the
decision-making. The tools can change, the audience can change, the structure
can change, the contents or anything else can change, but the act of navigating
through these possibilities is what writing is about. It's about finding the
important detail that will make a manual useful or a character in a story come
alive. It's about finding the structure that makes a Quick Start Guide useful or
a narrative gripping. It's about finding the right word or phrase that clarifies
a difficult concept, or expresses a thought well. These things will never
change, whether we write with a pen or with an electro-magnetic probe inserted
directly in our brain. Everything else is just context.
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