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If any old "experts" could just sit their butts down and write about a
product so that anybody could use it, there wouldn't be a need for
techsupport, or training courses, or techwriters, or rewriters to come in
and resurrect a slapped-together project.
Accuracy, clarity and suitability-for-task and -audience are all equally
important.
There are a number of definitions in the archives, but this is mine.... for
now:
What makes a technical communicator not-a-typist is the (actual or
perceived) ability to understand what a potential audience needs to know
about something, and then communicate that information to the audience so
that the audience may understand whatever it is being supported.
Ummm... "Dear Mom, my job here is to deliver information about complex
things to non-experts in a manner in which they may come to understand
those complex things more easily than they would if they had to figure it
all out on their own."
Now if you want a *REAL* rant, ask Dad about explaining Y2K to Grandma ;-D
At 12:57 PM -0800 12/12/99, Andrew Plato wrote:
>I always thought the Prime Directive was to write technically accurate
>information in a clear and concise manner. Seeing as how we're TECHNICAL
>writers and not AUDIENCE writers.
What kind of computer geek? Where did he go to school? Is it like Danny's
computer or Stevie's... or the ones you worked on in Santa Barbara?
"K stands for KILO, which is greek for thousand... [....] This is an IBM
card.... it only has so many holes, so they usually abbreviated... they
used millions of these cards to program that computer in Santa Barbara, but
they didn't keep them, so they don't know what got abbreviated.... now if
the computer doesn't know whether it's 1900 or 2000, it might register
your new car as a horseless carriage, or decide to wait 74 years to close
the floodgates. Yes, they still abbreviate so that instead of Year
Two-Thousand it's Y2K. They didn't keep the cards cos they made such nead
Xmas wreaths...."
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Brinegar Information Developer/Research Droid
"Leveraging Institutional Memory through Contextual
Digital Asymptotic Approximations of Application Processes
suited to utilization by Information-Constrained,
Self-Actualizing Non-Technologists."
vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com CCDB Vr2Link http://www.vr2link.com Performance S u p p o r t Svcs.
