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>> When was the last time that you participated in or witnessed a tech comm
>> project that fell apart because of poor writing skills?
>
>I have seen a project that had to be rewritten because, while the
information
>was probably correct, the document was so poorly written that it was
unusable. I
>have also seen a project that had to be rewritten because it was entirely
>inappropriate for the target audience -- writing for a particular audience
is
>part of writing skills.
I'm in the same process myself. Although the 'project' never fell apart,
this particular manual is apparently despised by at least one VP, marketers,
consultants, doc staff, and most everyone else, except the developers. I had
to reread paragraphs and sentences multiple times, in order to cut through
thickets of verbage to get to the core information, which, oftentimes, was
sadly lacking. I dont know anyone that could use this book to get their
tasks done except serious MVS JCL junkies.
Of course, this particular manual could also have benefited from some
serious user-based task analysis, also.
