Re: Why don't technical writer's do case studies?

Subject: Re: Why don't technical writer's do case studies?
From: Sean Hower <hokumhome -at- freehomepage -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 08:38:14 -0700 (PDT)



Case studies are a great idea for technical writers.

In the computer gaming industry, there's a site called Gamasutra. It is for designers and producers of computer games. Among other things, they have articles. The most useful of these articles are the Postmortems, which are an analysis of how a company went about creating a certain game. The articles are written by the people who actually worked on the game in question. They follow a basic format where they introduce the game and the company, giving background information. They then talk about all the things that went right. They then talk about all of the things that went wrong. Finally, they provide a conclusion. It's a great format, and it exposes patterns in practice, especially bad practices.

I think this sort of column/article when handled appropriately would be very useful. Such an article would give everyone an idea of what others are doing, how they're doing it, and how well things turned out. In short, it's a learning tool that I think technical writers could use.

We'd only need a forum that would be willing to handle such articles, preferablly a popular web site for technical writers that already publishes articles about tehcnical writing. If such a site had a discussion list, that would be a great plus. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. :-)

********************************************
Sean Hower

technical writer
http://hokum.freehomepage.com

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