Re: Technical Writing - What's the catch?

[Lou Quillio <quillio -at- gmail -dot- com>]

> Brian Jennings wrote:
 
> > Orwell says a writer should ask himself:
> > 1. What am I trying to say?
> > 2. What words will express it?
> > 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
> > 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Dick Margulis wrote:

> For most of us the questions are something more like this:
> 1. What is the audience?
> 2. What information do they need?
> 3. What is the clearest, simplest way to convey that information to the
> audience I've identified?

I must be missing something, because these lists look alike to me. 
Dick's list even appears to be (displays as? ;) a subset of Orwell's.

Tech pubs obviously shouldn't read like _Animal Farm_, but nobody's
saying they should.  At least at the level of sentence structure,
Orwell's Rules always get me a better product no matter the content or
audience.  What -sucks- (I really shouldn't use that word any more) is
that I probably won't have fully internalized them until the day I
die.

Then again, I'm rarely writing *for* engineers -- an audience with
unique expectations.  I'm usually translating engineers for more
general audiences.  Proposals, user docs, training materials.

LQ

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