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Subject:Re: A dark take on Tech Writing...do you agree? From:Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> Date:Wed, 5 Nov 2008 11:35:46 -0800 (PST)
Good line - I'm working on a story where I can use that after I file off the serial number.
I have also seen my share of things that seemed designed to violate the tenets of known good development methods. They seem to cluster in projects run by and for government agencies.
I've worked places where all the technical writing was under the control of the sales & marketing group. The logic in each place was, most of the company's technical writing was for the use of customers (help systems, white papers, etc.). That meant the CRM aspects of the documents were paramount, so the docs had to be done according to guidelines determined by the marketing people. In those places the work seemed to go pretty much the same as in other companies - the main difference was in having to make it more the content more "personable" than it might otherwise have been.
> I've
> encountered many products that convinced me they sprouted
> from some sort of alien pod rather than from an engineering
> process.
>
> Gene Kim-Eng
>
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