Re: A philosophical tech writing question

[Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>]

Keith Hood wrote:
> Jeez, Ned...
> 
> I guess it is possible to take your detachment 
 > to that kind of Chinese-monk-meditating-under-a-waterfall
 > level, but really, what's the point?

Something philosophical? But what exactly, I can't say.

> If having "personality" injected into the final work 
 > does not harm the value of the work, why bother?

I recall a glancing discussion here about
this that arose because someone wanted
to use the word AND to mean OR with the
explanation that 'back home we all use it that way.'

Call it personality or culture, sometimes our quirks
are not as transparent as we think they are, and that is
the best reason I know to pursue a selfless (objective?) style in tech
writing.

Some engineering cultures treat communication severely--
they wouldn't see any point (and would take off points) in anything 
beyond what is minimally necessary to write clearly. Anything beyond 
that would be flouting conciseness, and an open invitation to introduced 
ambiguity, error, ...

But yes, I see that documentation doesn't all need to
be carved from so close to the bone. I can read manuals
that have a strong individualistic voice, and I can take such
work seriously as long as the voice is that of someone who
knows what they're talking about. Some of my favorite tech
manuals over the years were written by experts in the 1st person, so
I don't think I'm being doctrinally inflexible about the
latitudes where personality and tech writing lie.

So I'm sure the middle ground exists in tech writing,
and I admit that personality in tech writing might add a great
deal more value than I'm aware of. I say that because I know I'm
emotionally unavailable when I'm pipelining work--to me, ANY 
distractions in the documentation I'm using aren't appreciated then-- 
but I am aware that many others in the workplace are "people people"
who might possibly appreciate the more overt human touches of 
personality to spur them through reading technical documentation.

> What would be the virtue of having a document written 
 > in such a manner that it is totally impossible to
 > discern any human element in the writing?

Personally, I could enjoy good documentation written or assembled
by a computer.

In fact, I'm planning on getting out of tech writing just as soon
as computers can do it. The human dependency intrigues me, and the 
English language sure seems to have that, but some day, ...


Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com

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