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Subject:Re: This page left blank From:"Huber, Mike" <mrhuber -at- SOFTWARE -dot- ROCKWELL -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 12 Jun 1997 13:35:26 -0500
I remember once reading a manual (fancy that - I read a manual!) where
the author included sections of a real cheesy story on all the pages
that would otherwise have been left blank.
The result had a very unprofessional feel to it, but it did cause me to
read the manual.
I tend not to read manuals, except to see what [the competition | my
colleagues] are doing. For actual tool use, I deal with the manual the
way most of my readers deal with mine: when all else fails...
Mike Huber
Mike -dot- Huber -at- software -dot- rockwell -dot- com
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Wayne J. Douglass [SMTP:wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM]
>Sent: Thursday, June 12, 1997 1:10 PM
>To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
>Subject: Re: This page left blank
>
>At 10:49 AM 6/12/97 -0700, Elna Tymes wrote:
>>
>>Good guess, Geoff, but you didn't go back quite far enough. This one
>>dates from the military hardware-writer days, when certain MIL-SPECs
>>dictated every little thing on how to write manuals. Some of the
>>MIL-SPECs specifically ordered that "This page intentionally left blank"
>>be printed on an otherwise blank page.
>>
>Good history lesson from Elna. Since it is a DOD spec, putting the phrase on
>a blank page doesn't *have* to make sense, but I was told that the logic
>behind the direction was to make it explicit that there wasn't *supposed* to
>be any information on the page - in case readers worried that they had
>somehow got an incomplete manual.
>
>
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