In praise of editors...?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Bonnie Granat notes: <<Indeed, and some of us (me, mainly, I guess)  
are more editors than technical writers, though I could probably make  
a fortune if Microsoft ever decides to create topics that "help"  
people for Microsoft Word, Excel, and so forth.>>

Me too, though in defence of the writers and editors at Microsoft,  
they may not have much say over what they get to create*. (I don't  
get any impression that software development at Microsoft is any more  
rational than software development elsewhere.) What they do write is  
reasonably well written -- though it fails to answer my questions as  
often as it answers them, or provides answers that don't actually  
match the behavior of the software. I'm sure the same could be said  
of any of the documentation _we_ create.

* Except for their manual of style, which strikes me as nuts far more  
often than it makes me go "yeah, good call".

I recall hearing (from a reliable source, too long ago to attribute)  
that the original design specification for online help for some  
Microsoft product (possibly Word?) was that it had to fit on a single  
1.4-Meg floppy disk. If true, that kind of ignorant attitude can  
poison the environment for writers and editors for many years to  
come. It takes an awful lot of advocacy and the kind of political  
power most of us lack to change things when they're that badly  
disfunctional.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
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***Now available***  _Effective onscreen editing_
(http://www.geoff-hart.com/home/onscreen-book.htm)


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