RE: Interesting Article... fewest jobs lost in Tech Writing

["Jane Carnall" <jane -dot- carnall -at- digitalbridges -dot- com>]

Dan Hall wrote:
>I use Word pretty much every day, and I've never read any
>Word documentation. But if Word wasn't coded, or didn't have
>a GUI, I'd be in tough shape.

I see your fine distinction, and such as it is <g> I take your point. OTOH,
I have been using Word professionally (on and off) for my entire career as a
technical writer, and I *have* read the Word documentation. (The online
help, that is. I used to help my dad *with* the Word documentation back when
they used to produce a cr -at- ppy manual.)  I have also read a bunch of stuff
that ought to be in the official Word documentation if Bill Gates had
one-billionth as much common sense as he has US dollars - like the website
with the Seven Laws of outline numbering that I cited earlier today.

You can use Word, badly, without ever reading the documentation: it has a
sufficiently good user interface for that purpose. You can, with sufficient
experience (=hard knocks) learn to use Word well without ever reading the
documentation.

With a sufficiently good user interface, you can figure out a lot of things
with a GUI product without reading the documentation, and increasingly GUI
might as well stand for Good User Interface.

However, I write documentation for a product with a GUI: and it isn't a bad
GUI at all, as these things go. But the things that you can do with this
product are sufficiently complex, and it matters enough to my company that
they are done well, that no GUI is good enough to school the users through
the Kindergarten of Hard Knocks. Is the documentation part of the product? I
haven't asked if that's how they think of it. Will they willingly ship a
version of the product without the documentation? Nope. For all practical
intents and purposes, the documentation is part of the product.

Jane Carnall
The writers all stand around a cauldron chanting and occasionally tossing in
a small manual. Unless stated otherwise, these opinions are mine, and mine
alone. Apologies for the long additional sig: it is added automatically and
outwith my control.


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