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On 12/14/99 9:43 PM, Andrew Plato (intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com) wrote:
>My beef: Too many tech writers do exactly that. They spend hours upon
>hours obsessing over their audience when they should be learning about
>the subject matter.
I've worked at too many companies where this was exactly the case. At one
company, the documentation was so appropriate for the audience many of
them were probably reading it for pleasure. It was, however, technically
inaccurate and incomplete, and the audience was poorly-served. Given the
choice, I'll take accuracy.
I think that Andrew was mostly right (sorry Andrew... I'll bet that
"mostly" kind of grates) in his original arguments. The "audience" debate
has gotten out of hand to the point where people have forgotten that the
audience is picking up the documentation for one thing first:
information. And inaccurate information is no longer information; it's
just text on a page.
