Fwd: Re: What sayest me... on Worthless TC Degrees

[Jean Ostrem <jostrem -at- tdl -dot- com>]

I haven't seen too many people agreeing with John Posada, so I think 
I'm going to jump in and agree with him.

I tend to use indexes, but the best user manual I ever saw didn't 
have an index. Actually, maybe it did. I don't know because I never 
needed the index. It was task-oriented, graphics-centric, and lovely. 
I spent something like 60 minutes skimming it, and then I knew enough 
about the operating system to get my work done. On rare occasions 
when I really needed to look something up, I grabbed the manual and 
flipped through it. No index needed because all I had to do was look 
for the picture that showed the screen I was on.

That manual was a true work of art. I revere it, and I try to emulate 
it wherever I can. But the things I write tend to be a lot pithier 
than end-user manuals on simple system tasks. So I index. A lot.