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Re: Culture, or What it means to be a Technical Writer
Subject:Re: Culture, or What it means to be a Technical Writer From:"Eric J. Ray" <ejray -at- RAYCOMM -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 8 May 1998 13:32:00 -0600
At 02:59 PM 5/8/98 -0400, you wrote:
>But don't you see, the engineer communicates through the design of the
>product. 1,203 page user manuals result from writers trying to explain what
>engineers have done.
<snip>
And effective user manuals result from writers explaining to users
how users can do what they want to do. From my perspective,
awful manuals usually result from explaining what the product
does and how it does it, while effective manuals--of any length--
result from explaining to users how to accomplish something
that users care about accomplishing.
Eric
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