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> HOWEVER... a writer who's never seen the particular tool
> before will necessarily bring to it the approaches and
> experience s/he's had with other tools.
Yep.
> So, there they are, 7 hours after arriving at your
> company, dutifully cranking out their first page or
> two of Help, as they did it with Doc2Help.
> But they're using (say) Flare now, with no previous
> experience and a [n apparently] frantic deadline to
> provide some evidence of motion. (Gotta justify having
> displaced [former?] in-house writer[s].) So they start.
I don't get the "displaced" part.
Any writer (any person, to be fair) who jumps in blind without testing
the waters is showing that they still lack some experience. But I'll
go along with your model for now. ;-)
> Weeks later, it becomes apparent that there are some
> problems due to having used pliers as though they
> were a wrench. Considerable backtracking and fixing
> is necessary on dozens of pages. Stuff that the writer
> didn't understand about the Flare design philosophy
> has been bolluxed and must be rectified before the
> single-source stuff will work properly.
If it takes weeks to discover this, more went wrong than using pliers
like a wrench.
> Finding this out, and then finding out how to fix it,
> and then fixing it... turns out to take about as long
> as giving the displaced in-house writers a three-day
> training or access to (and time for) the Flare Webinars.
Who's advocating experience over training here? I think the topic's gone askew.
> Plus, of course, the disgruntled or dismissed in-house
> writer takes away her/his headful of years of experience
> and history with your products.
Still not sure where the disgruntlement or dismissal comes into play,
unless you're making a very specific, targeted argument to support a
previously overarching point.
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