Re: Style/Layout for Manuals

[John Posada <john -at- TDANDW -dot- COM>]

Hi, Maggie...

I'll admit that I was feeling rather smug when I posted that email. OTOH, I'm
particularly adept at recognizing patterns and spatial relationships, so it was
easy for me to skim down the "before" example and find the words required by
seeing the pattern.

However, in all seriousness, I don't know what is taught under the guise of the
copyrighted process and to be honest, after looking at the before and after
example in the "test", I couldn't believe that anyone would even attempt to
sends out the "before" example to begin with. It looked like a legal contract.

All of my writing life, I (and I'm sure anyone that has written "for the user")
have been very liberal with bullets, tables, captions, headers, etc., it just
seemed the normal way to do it. I rarely have more than a third of a page of
content without a header, table, break of some type, though I disagree with
placing line dividers. Maybe because I'm sensitive to patterns that it just
came naturally.

Like I said, what's the big deal?



MAGGIE SECARA wrote:

> You'll notice it says you did something very few people do. That is,
> most other people find an info mapping layout improves their ability to
> find and process information. The amount of white space, the separating
> out, the captions, all contribute to this. Chunking the information and
> lots of tables and lists do too.
>

> HAD gone for the formal training. It's so sensible, and so in line with
> everything I know about good technical writing, I use it for almost
> everything.  (The revised-reformatted manual has been very well
> received, incidentally.)
>
>

> John Posada wrote:
>
> > Hi, guys...
> >
> > I checked out their site and they have a little test to show how
> > effective information mapping is.  I took the test...following is a
> > piece of the results:

--
John Posada, Technical Writer
Bellcore, where Customer Satisfaction is our number one priority
mailto:john -at- tdandw -dot- com   mailto:jposada -at- notes -dot- cc -dot- bellcore -dot- com
My opinions are mine, and neither you nor my company can take credit for
them.
  "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish,
and he will sit in a boat and smoke cigars all day."
  "The only perfect document I ever created is still on my hard drive."


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