Re: Using Humor Judiciously

[Robert Plamondon <robert -at- PLAMONDON -dot- COM>]

There's a difference between choosing a humorous guide to a product
and having one inflicted upon you.  For ships-with-the-product
documentation, any humor would be corraled into footnotes, italicized
chapter prefaces, sidebars, or other traditional places for semi-
extraneous matter.  This separates the fun stuff from the serious
stuff, and you'll find that users will often go through the book
reading the fun stuff before they tackle the nasty technical stuff.
This is an old gimmick for reducing the threat level of textbooks.

(My high-school geometry book was perfectly straightforward, except that
it was filled with more-or-less relevant comic strips, and that, instead
of labeling all the points in the sequence [A,B,C,...], the points always
spelled out something strange.)

        -- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon, President/Managing Editor, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc.
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert -at- plamondon -dot- com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139

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