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Doctors perform autopsies, structual engineers do lengthy analyses when a
building collapes, and historians of course love to pick through political
and military disasters.
Why don't tech writers analyze how errors get in their work? Too painful?
Too embarrassing? Too time consuming? Maybe a little of all of those.
Be that as it may, case studies could provide practical help in avoiding
mistakes. I think I will start documenting my own case studies and here is
a start.
Day one, Entry One.
Don't trust revision or edition numbers on manuscripts you are handed from
others. Go directly to the source and verify . Like Reagan said with respect
to the Russians -- trust, but verify. There are so many ways organizations
designate changed manuscripts, but unless they use a clear system and have
the discipline to follow their strategy, you cannot be sure that two
manuscripts that have identical revision notations on the cover are actually
the same.
Day One, Entry Two,
Always make a screen display of graphics you place in your file. File names,
especially file names that relate to the sequence that illustrations come
in, are little more than useless and are usually misleading to tell the
truth. For EPS files that are saved without a screen preview all you see is
the file name. Related to this, is: Always use the preview features of Word,
FrameMaker or whatever when inserting graphics. Which leads to the
corallary: when saving graphics art, always create a screen preview.
Wouldn't it be great if every techwriter subscribed to techwr-L would
contribute entries to such a database? What would it take up to setup an
entry form? \we need to study our trainwrecks. 5,000 people contributing to
such a file -- boggles the mind.
Rich Collins
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