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I could assume a certain amount of knowledge on the part of my audience... I always included a section that said something like "The conventions in this document assume a basic knowledge of Windows software."
If you have *really* basic users, you would have to spell it out for
them everywhere anyway.
<snippety snip snip snip>
IMHO, that would be a conventions section, Nora. As soon as you mention something that the reader may use to understand where your head was when writing the manual, you're giving them a type of "conventions dictionary".
And as far as spelling it out for really basic users, all that is is including the conventions within the manual. I think that whether we like it or not, we all use "conventions translators" in some way, and our users are the better for it, so why not?
(sniff, sniff, do I smell burnt toast?)
Lisa Comeau
my laptop is dead and so is my signature macro
comeaul -at- csa -dot- ca
