Re: What Are Writing Skills?
--- Martha J Davidson <editrix -at- nemasys -dot- com> wrote:
It's one thing to analyze a system, whether by
identifying the flow of data or using some
other technique that produces clear understanding of
the system and what it does, and yet another to
derive from that a logical flow for presenting the
information to people who must use the system.
Tony Markos responds:
I really don't see it that way. If the anlysis is
good, anything derived from the analysis is going to
be a straight shot - a natural fallout, not requiring
near the amount of thought. I have always experienced
such.
That would be trivially true if your object in documenting a system were to _explain_ the system to people who have to maintain it or who need an overall understanding of its operation so they can supervise it.
In other types of documentation, though, it is not true at all. Martha is correct that you have to think in terms of the view that a particular audience has of the system. A monkey climbing a tree looks a lot different from below than it does from an adjacent branch; and the way someone interacts with a system similarly depends on where they are sitting.
Martha J Davidson:
As several people have said, the ability to write
good documentation requires an understanding of how to
structure the information that you must present.
Tony Markos:
Again, I have to disagree. Once you properly
structure the product through analysis, the structure
of the documentation is relatively straight forward.
And again, Martha is correct. Structuring information for presentation is a different task from analyzing the structure of the system. Both require skill. Both are important. But the skills needed are different. I'm not suggesting that one person can't master both. Obviously both are needed in tech writing and many people do just fine. But one is not a derivative of the other.
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