Re: HELP

[Elna Tymes <Etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM>]

As president of a very fast-growing technical publications company in
Silicon Valley, with considerable experience dealing with engineering
companies, I can easily say "There ain't no one way."

We get material for technical publications in just about every way
possible: written specs, Email notes, notes taken at development
meetings, white papers, sitting down and playing with the system (yes,
you DO have to know how to use the system in that case), talking with the
source people, even sitting at engineer's knee with a tape recorder
going.  It would be lovely if programmers and engineers would have the
source material, such as specs, ready when you begin to work on a
document.  Unfortunately, few are.  So we've taken whatever we can get
our hands on, and NEVER made fixed-price bids unless the source material
was so clear that making it into a technical manual was totally
predictable.

There is also another way to get source material. I call it "writing by
provocation."  This is sometimes what you have to resort to when your
source information is incomplete or inaccurate, and you can't get what
you need any other way.  In that case, I write a draft with
clearly-labeled missing or inaccurate pieces, and indicate that I need
help filling the holes or fixing the inaccuracies.  Normally I get back a
review copy with a satisfactory amount of red ink showing me the error of
my ways - and including the missing or accurate information. 's OK - I'll
take it any way I can get it.

Good luck! There's a good reason technical writers get grey faster than
programmers.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems