Re: been asked for advice by "non-writers"?

[Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

The solution to this, provided you have the support of your management, is
to have an announcement made from the top down that the publications group
(or the tech writer if it's just you) will establish corporate style guides
for all manuals.  When SMEs follow one of yours and their managers don't
like it, they can fall back on "it's the corporate format," and when the
managers come to you with their contrary preferences you can explain that
doing it the way they want will cause their product's documents to be
inconsistent with the rest of the company's other products.  Managers hate
inconsistency, and the higher up the corporate ladder they climb, the more
they hate it.

Gene Kim-Eng



On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Sarah Blake <Sarah -dot- Blake -at- nice -dot- com> wrote:

>
> I reviewed the latest draft of the document, sat down with her to discuss
> technical writing best practices and the reasons behind them, and...
> discovered that that was the way she'd written her initial draft, and that
> her bosses had insisted on changes that made the document less clear and
> worse structured.
>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Writer Tip: Create 10 different outputs with Doc-To-Help -- including Mobile and EPUB.

Read all about them: http://bit.ly/doc-to-help-10-outputs
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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-leave -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com


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

Looking for articles on Technical Communications?  Head over to our online magazine at http://techwhirl.com

Looking for the archived Techwr-l email discussions?  Search our public email archives @ http://techwr-l.com/archives