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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:Damien Braniff <Damien_Braniff -at- PAC -dot- CO -dot- UK> Date:Mon, 11 May 1998 09:00:30 +0100
>>effective manuals--of any length--
result from explaining to users how to accomplish something
that users care about accomplishing>>
I agree totally but we then get into the argument do we simply tell them
how to do X or do we provide (relevant ?) background that they may/may not
want? Like everything else I think it's down to the audience analysis -
would they want to/need to know?
I have also written user manuals that simply documented every single
feature (military!) as we were told we couldn't tell them how to use it,
only what it could do, as we didn't know what they'd be doing with it!!
