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Quoting TechComm Dood <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>:
> So why the emphasis and draw to tools?
Because tools are easy to talk about and teach. They keep you focused on a
particular topic.
It's much harder to talk about concepts such as managing your time, or tactics
for writing a procedure, or converting tech-writing to marketing purposes. These
concepts are more complex. When you write about a tool, you can tell people
specifically what to do to get a certain result. But when you talk about a
tactic, you can only suggest the criteria for deciding when to use the tactic or
how. Under these circumstances, specific suggestions are almost impossible.
Just as importantly, we don't have a specific vocabulary to describe these
things, so talking about them is much more difficult. For example, many -
probably most - of the people on this list have a sense of when to use a
numbered list. But just how do you describe the proper circumstances, let alone
any variations? The problem is the same in any type of writing - novelists, for
example, lack the detailed vocabulary to discuss transitions between scenes. We
could probably manage to talk about such matters if we really tried, but,
without the detailed vocabulary to create a shorthand, the effort is
surprisingly difficult.
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