Re: What Are Writing Skills?

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Nobody other than you has ever said that the application
of structure or rhetoric in technical writing (or perhaps I
should play the same rhetorical trick that you do and limit
my discussion to *good* technical writing so that I can
dismiss a priori everything that does not fit with my theory
as bad technical writing) is both fundamental and vague.
What everybody has been saying, but what you steadfastly
refuse to recognize, is that it is fundamental and *complex*.
It is a process rather than a procedure (a distinction that
seems to be completely lost on you...). It is an approach
and a way of thinking rather than a simplistic algorithm or
a cookbook recipe.

To continue with the cooking metaphor, learning good
technical writing skills it is like learning how to sautee and
how to make a pan reduction sauce as opposed to learning
only the specific steps of how to make veal piccata or wiener
schnitzel. A true understanding the skills means that you
know how to use them with chicken or veal or fish so that
you can prepare hundreds of different dishes in a variety of
different cuisines (different deliverables adapted to different
audiences with different needs). The MacDonalds approach
of rigorously analyzing and slavishly repeating the prescribed
steps to produce a Quarter Pounder doesn't meet everybody's
dining needs. Some people want to have a hamburger
"their way", and lots of people want something better than
a fast-food hamburger in the first place.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ