Generalized rant.

[Sharon Burton <sharonburton -at- EMAIL -dot- MSN -dot- COM>]

<rant>

I am rewriting a help system written by some other unknown person. I have
another to do as well for this project. I know I am not the only one on this
list who follows modern tech writing standards but I have to tell you
people, this project is making me depressed. The entire project is written
in future tense, there are wishes and desires throughout the project, we
have very complicated sentence structures that use really big words, and
many other problems I must fix. Comma faults and comma splices everywhere.
May's all over. Terminates instead of breaks. Several As mentioned
earlier's. In a help file! Like the user read earlier! Like I could find
earlier!

I am generally moderate about the certification concept, but if it would
make the really bad writing go away, I am all for it. Then again, this sort
of writing does make many of us a living when we are brought in to fix the
help that none of the users could understand or use.

The next one is 5 times bigger and just as bad. And written by a different
person. sigh. I spend so much time and effort teaching my students how to
write well, and it seems there are a large number of people out there making
apparently a decent living turning out stuff no one can understand. In
future tense with lots of wishing and desiring and other stuff going on. It
is depressing.

Just needed to rant to a few minutes. I have been fixing this 650+ topics
help for 3 days. Getting goofy, I guess.

</rant>

Happy turkey day everyone!

sharon

Sharon Burton-Hardin
President of the Inland Empire chapter of the STC
Anthrobytes Consulting
Home of RoboNEWS(tm), the unofficial RoboHELP newsletter
www.anthrobytes.com
Check out www.WinHelp.net!
See www.sharonburton.com!


 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=