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Your class's experience is just further prof that written text is a
very poor vehicle to use for documenting procedural information. To quote
Ed Yourdon "Procedure is like dance - it defies written description."
What Ed means is that procedure is asynchronous - multiple things happening
at the same time and multi-decision branching. Text is very poor at
describing such.
Steve Arrants responded:
And yet people have been using text-only procedures quite successfully for
years and years.
Tony Markatos responds:
You are stating that the status quo, in terms of documentation usability, is
all right. There are a lot knowledgeable people who strongly disagree with
you.
Steve Arrants said:
It isn't that the text is poor in some situations, it may be that the writer
isn't in the same mind-set as the user.
Tony Markatos responds:
It is often true that the writer has a different mind set than the user.
That is another issue. The fact remains that written text is a very poor
means of communicating procedural information.
Steve Arrants said:
Flow-chart graphics may only further confuse and frustrate the user. You
not only need to know WHAT the procedure will do, but WHY the user would
need to do it.
Tony Markatos:
I'll go you one step further: graphics usually confuse more than clarify.
The reason is that most technical communicators are poor at creating
graphics.
However, the above does not change the fact that good graphics (along with
supporting text) clearly communicate procedural information. And that text
is a poor means of communicating procedural information. (For the reason
stated at the top of this post.)
Tony Markatos
(tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com)
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