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>What really makes me doubt the story, though, is that my understanding
>of the NASA shuttle launch documentation isn't organized in a way that
>"a warning" about temperatures and o-rings could really be inserted
>anywhere. It isn't a procedural manual in the sense that most of us are
>familiar with.
Maybe that's the problem. Perhaps NASA needs a getting-started guide in
their documentation set for the space shuttles of the future. I'd be happy
to write one for them. Or better yet, I'll take the stuff their engineers
write and make it look really nice in FrameMaker. As long as I get to
choose the fonts.
Seriously, though, this thread does highlight how narrowly many of us look
at the field (fields?) of technical communication. What would be
appropriate in a documentation set for a software can be simply ludicrous
in another context, just as a single warning statement (regardless of
whether it would be set off with a bold sideheading in print or bright red
flashing text, if you're in HTML) would hardly be a reasonable method for
conveying a risk of such magnitude.
Bill
technicoid -at- cableone -dot- net
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