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McLauchlan, Kevin wrote:
> Gene Kim-Eng replied to Barbara D's comment about a freelance editor who
> has a good business as the "one editor here for every eight or ten
> writers 'over
>
<snip>
>
> Time is the best remedy to wear away the glaze that protects your own
> work from your own editorial eye. If you don't get the opportunity for
> that kind of time _during_ the release schedule, you'll get it at the
> beginning of the next release. OhmygawdIwrotethat?
I used to dread the morning after a release, because of exactly this
effect.
Now, I do relish the insertion of distance between me and my darlings,
my documents. By release day, I'm usually tired of the pages and the
intimacy I've developed with them, because the intimate knowledge of
what I've written has ceased to be an accurate reflection of what's on
the page when seen through the eyes of detached end users.
In economic terms, the law of diminishing returns has kicked in--finding
and fixing that last few percent of problems is disproportionately more
costly. A day, a month, a year from release, I know errors will glare
menacingly up at me from prominent places on those same pages where I
found none the night before the release.
So, in the interest of ribaldry and the finer emotions that attach me to
technical writing, I've found myself another writing outlet for
expressing my document attachments and those morning after rituals.
The aubade, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubade), now that's what I'm
talking about. As a form, it comes preconfigured for every eventuality
of the type, from the document that you wake up-with one morning and
wonder what possessed you to write it, to the one you admire and fondly
remember long after the editor you finally got has defaced it and made
it his/her own. To tech writers who have these same issues, I say,
"Write aubades," Let it all hang out.
TGIF,
Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com
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