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Re: Can Someone Give Me a Quick and Dirty Outline for a Technica l Manual
Subject:Re: Can Someone Give Me a Quick and Dirty Outline for a Technica l Manual From:David Downing <DavidDowning -at- users -dot- com> To:"'TW posts'" <TECHWR-L -at- LISTS -dot- RAYCOMM -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 10 Sep 1999 10:23:36 -0400
I'm afraid you left out one important detail that we need in order to tell
you how you should organize your manual. Who is the audience????? If it's
end users, then you need to organize it around what they want to use the
software for. (For example, if the software is a word processor, they want
to know how to create and print whatever type of document they're working
on.) If you're writing for system administrators, they'll want to know how
to install and maintain the software on their system. If your writing for
other programmers, they'll want to know about file structures, record
structures, and stuff like that. This is where to start. Otherwise, you
could end up producing something that appears to be a very well-written,
well organized manual, but falls flat on its face because it wasn't written
for the audience that's going to use it.
