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Re: Chattiness in manuals

Subject: Re: Chattiness in manuals
From: Al Geist <al -dot- geist -at- geistassociates -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 07:02:01 -0400

SaraTörök wrote:

Depends on what you classify as manuals, but in school books (even at university level) and technical litterature, the chatty style is much more common from US writers than it is in Europe, and we tend to get quite disturbed by it.
Paid by the word - probably not full-time technical writers so often, but, again, for authors of hand books, tutorials, technical litterature, this is much more common in US publications. Is this not true anymore?


In my over 30 years of writing, the only time I ever got paid "by the word" was working as a stringer (corespondent, stringer, etc.) for a regional weekly business newspaper. When I wrote for magazines, other newspapers or video productions, I was paid either by the story, the "column-inch," or the script. All of my technical writing has been paid either by the project or hourly, or when I worked as a staff technical writer, hourly based on an annual salary.


As for chatty style writing, I think using it in most technical publications does a disservice to the users, and too often what we thing is funny falls flat on others. I write rather detailed user guides and operation manuals for microelectronic manufacturing systems, or reference guides for complex database management systems. Trying to be chatty in either genre could end up costing my clients a lot of money, and I don't think they would like that, so I save my chatty writing for other venues-essays/op ed pieces, short stories, letters to my kids, my journal, etc.

Al

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References:
RE: Chattiness in manuals: From: SaraTörök
Re: Chattiness in manuals: From: David Farbey

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