Thursday, April 01, 2004
A week-long discussion with technical writing professionals
I have the pleasure of announcing that our discussion this week will be taking place in collaboration with workplace professionals. I will ask them to introduce themselves in their first posting, tell us what they do, and what software tools they use at work and then to respond, when they have time, to our discussion topic for this week.
Discussion topic
On page 383 in Writing Software Documentation, Thomas Barker writes "...many problems in the language of software documentation all revolve around two central difficulties: failure to write so that the user can perform the task easily, and failure to write as if we were speaking to real human beings."
Let's discuss this claim by Barker in terms of our own experiences. Is he correct, partially correct, not at all correct? What do our professional guests have to say about this claim?
Discussion topic
On page 383 in Writing Software Documentation, Thomas Barker writes "...many problems in the language of software documentation all revolve around two central difficulties: failure to write so that the user can perform the task easily, and failure to write as if we were speaking to real human beings."
Let's discuss this claim by Barker in terms of our own experiences. Is he correct, partially correct, not at all correct? What do our professional guests have to say about this claim?
