RE: "Too Good" (was: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years - Help!)

["Anameier, Christine A - Eagan, MN" <christine -dot- a -dot- anameier -at- usps -dot- gov>]

Goober wrote:
> An outline on its own is useless to me. Need the info...

Kinda sounds to me like we're in vehement agreement there. :)

> By "complete" . . . I mean "stands on its own without
> needing trainee-written notes to be intelligible." Whole.
> Sufficient.
>
>> Will never happen. Unless you know your audience to
>> the point where you could step in and do their day to
>> day work without training yourself, you won't get to
>> that level.

You'd have to know your audience *almost* that well to write effective
docs at all, IMO. Whether that means grilling SMEs or support people or
the users themselves, you have to learn enough to understand the users'
tasks and goals--and then I believe you can write something that is at
least *mostly* sufficient. 

Christine

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