RE: What is More Important?

Subject: RE: What is More Important?
From: <richard -dot- melanson -at- us -dot- tel -dot- com>
To: <Janice -dot- Gelb -at- Sun -dot- COM>, <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 10:37:09 -0400

Thank you for the segue Janice :-)
I attempted to address a few thoughts I had by asking the group this question. First I just wanted to get everyone's opinion, simply a choice of one or the other. I am amazed that almost everyone did not JUST pick one. I have been a member of this list off and on for the 14 years I have been a Technical Writer and we all know who the active posters are, who the lurkers are, etc. I was also looking for a specific response from two or three members of the list. I initially was not sure if the response would be on the list or off, but I eventually did get the response I expected. There are a couple other issues I wanted to address but I won't waste any further bandwidth.

Please allow me to close by pointing something out. Did anyone notice the people who responded and chose technical accuracy did so and were concise with their explanation. But the people who chose writing well appeared, to me, to have more passion, more energy, and much lengthier emails with their explanations. Just my observation.

Thank you everyone, for taking the time to respond, I sincerely appreciate the help and insight everyone has shared with me. Take care and be healthy, now I have a deadline to meet, see you guys in a month or so :-)
Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+richard -dot- melanson=us -dot- tel -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+richard -dot- melanson=us -dot- tel -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Janice Gelb
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 1:23 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: What is More Important?

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

***********************************************************
Janice Gelb | The only connection Sun has with
janice -dot- gelb -at- sun -dot- com | this message is the return address

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Follow-Ups:

References:
RE: What is More Important?: From: Lauren
Re: What is More Important?: From: Janice Gelb

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