Re: What is More Important?

Subject: Re: What is More Important?
From: Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 12:16:28 +0800

I'm with those who think that this question, as it's worded now, can't
be answered meaningfully.

There are things that matter other than being technically accurate and
well written. If any of these can make it harder for readers to
understand a concept or complete a task, how is it meaningful to pick
two factors and ask which is more important?

Here's a thought experiment: imagine you have asked ten representative
users to test a procedure. Two testers complete the task successfully in
a reasonable time. Four testers complete the task but it takes them a
lot longer. The other four testers don't successfully complete the task.
You talk to all the testers and discover the following:
- one component was labeled incorrectly
- one instruction was ambiguous--it could be read two ways,
one right and one wrong
- one tester took over three minutes to find a relevant topic;
another tester didn't find it at all.
- a table was formatted using a smaller font that one tester found
too hard to read
- the diagram on p33 appears to contradict the text explanation on p32
- only three of testers understood that the terms 'node' and 'host'
sometimes referred to the same thing and sometimes to different
things
- the instructions are correct if you happen to be operating in
console mode but not if you happen to be in log mode
- in one very long and complex sentence, it was hard to tell whether
a step had to be done by an operator or a by supervisor or if it
would just happen automatically

There are a lot of problems here. Some are problems of technical
accuracy, some are due to poor writing, some are neither. In what way is
it useful to say that the technical problems are more important, or the
writing problems are more important, or that the technical and writing
problems are more important than the others?

Stuart

> Well written = understandable English, the occasional missing comma,
> active/passive voice used inconsistently, about what a current
> college grad could write.
> Technically accurate = The manual could be used to, lets say,
> to build a back yard storage shed from scratch w/o any additional
> instructions.
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