Re: Subject: Re: New doc group: FrameMaker or Flare?

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Yes and no. On the one hand, it frees up any developer to write with
the understanding that it will be cleaned up and made pretty later by
someone else. On the other hand, you're injecting quite a bit of
overhead into a process that might not be necessary.

Developers are intelligent folk (the jury's still out on "smart",
however we're all idiots in our own right). Most also tend to prefer
order over chaos. Teach them the right way to do things, and they're
likely to adopt the practice, especially if it's easy. I've had much
success in training developers to write clean, correct documentation.
Many like to do it once they understand how, especially if they (or
you) can draw the 1:1 correlation between what they've created and how
someone should ideally use it successfully.

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 11:54 AM, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
> If the situation is likely to turn out to be one in which the developers are
> going to revise existing docs and possibly even create new ones with contract
> writers being brought in "as needed" (IOW, when the developers bollux up the
> drafts so badly that nobody in-house can fix them), then my advice would be to
> develop simple templates in the existing WP infrastructure, find one person in
> the company who is interested in learning how to tag styles and generate
> deliverable PDFs (perhaps an admin or doc control specialist with an interest),
> then encourage the developers to type their input into the WP or WordPad as
> unformatted text and pass it to that person for formatting and final production
> (and the company to give that person a raise to go with the added
> responsibility).  A single point operation in this area will help avoid a lot of
> chaos in the documentation.

-- 
Bill Swallow

Twitter: @techcommdood
Blog: http://techcommdood.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/techcommdood
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Create and publish documentation through multiple channels with Doc-To-Help. 
Choose your authoring formats and get any output you may need. Try 
Doc-To-Help, now with MS SharePoint integration, free for 30-days. 
http://www.doctohelp.com

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to 
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info. 

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat