Re: What is More Important?

[Janice Gelb <Janice -dot- Gelb -at- Sun -dot- COM>]

Lauren wrote:
>
 > Janice Gelb wrote:
 >>
>> The only purpose to this question that I
>> can see would be for someone looking for an
>> excuse for inelegant writing due to deadline
>> pressures forced by late technical changes.
> 
> I see two possibilities.  One is of a writer that wants more time from a
> project manager to tidy up the document, but the PM says just make it
> "accurate."  Another possibility is of a PM wants a deliverable to look
> well-written and the PM doesn't care about the accuracy of the content.
> I've been in situations where PMs will say that content doesn't matter
> because people won't read the document anyway.
> 

The third possibility, which hadn't occurred to me
when I wrote my original message, is to justify
having engineers write documentation because if
accuracy is more important than writing skills
then you can get rid of writers altogether. Note
that I am *not* saying that this is necessarily
what the original poster meant. However, because
the answer to his question was obviously going to
be overwhelmingly either that you need both or
that technical accuracy was most important if you
had to choose, I immediately had the reaction that
the person asking the question must want to be able
to say there was support for his opinion in some
discussion related to the preference of technical
accuracy over writing skill.

-- Janice

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