Re[2]: Overcoming Technophobia

[Bonni Graham <Bonni_Graham_at_Enfin-SD -at- RELAY -dot- PROTEON -dot- COM>]

Reply-To:
 "Technical Writers List; for all Technical Communication issues"              <
From:         Karen Kay <karenk -at- NETCOM -dot- COM>
Comments: To: TECHWR-L -at- VM1 -dot- ucc -dot- okstate -dot- edu
In-Reply-To:  <199311052257 -dot- OAA03892 -at- mail -dot- netcom -dot- com>; from "Fred Wersan" at
              Nov 5, 93 5:45 pm
SMTP-CCMail translator Ver: acm 2.73 8/18/93
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Fred Wersan said:
> I think that even people who aren't phobic like screen captures, though
> not of every prompt, warning, etc. (At least I sure do)

Karen Kay noted:
>I tend to, too, but sometimes plain screen captures are confusing--you
>are not sure what you are supposed to be paying attention to if there
>is a lot of stuff on the screen. It's nice if you can somehow
>highlight the screen capture, or explicate it in the text so that you
>can tell what you are supposed to be seeing.

  Absolutely.  Therefore, caption 'em carefully, and use callouts if you can and
  if they are appropriate.  In my case, all I had to do was show them the screen
  they were supposed to be on -- it was pretty much intuitive after that (due to
  GREAT design on the part of the software engineer who developed it).

  On Fred's note, screen captures are a great boon to the visual learner, as
  well as the non-native English speaker.  We are supposed to be addressing
  different kinds of learning, right?

Bonni Graham                               | font, n. Loosely, a typeface
Technical Writer                           | or family of typefaces.  A
Easel Corporation, ENFIN Technology Lab    | bit-mapped font is one that
Bonni_Graham_at_Enfin-SD -at- relay -dot- proteon -dot- com | displays a typeface on the
President, San Diego STC                   | screen of a computer.  Type-
                                           | faces for laser printers,
NOTE: apparently my email address needs    | which must be kept in
to be typed exactly as it appears here,    | the Blessed System
punctuation and all, or the system gets    | Folder, are known as bap-
upset.                                     | tismal fonts.
                                           |          --Ezra Shapiro