Re: Techwriter's toolkits and "application holy wars"

Subject: Re: Techwriter's toolkits and "application holy wars"
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 14:43:11 -0300


Bill Hall wrote:

The issue behind this holy war and many of the others (e.g., over fonts,
processes, information mapping, etc...), is that these debates involve
differences in document paradigms (if you aren't sure what the term means,
search Google for [paradigm "thomas kuhn"]. Where techwriting is concerned
we are faced with several competing paradigms, e.g., paper vs structured
documents, data management vs knowledge management, learning vs teaching,
etc..

Kuhn's ideas and the concept of paradigms can be applied as a loose metaphor to tech-writing, but I'm sceptical about taking them literally. If you compare the switch from Newtonian to relativistic physics to any of the things quoted above, you'll see what I mean. These oppositions don't seem to be competing paradigms - fundamentally different ways of looking at the tasks - so much as minor differences in emphasis. Both paper and structured documents, for example,contain the same elements. The difference is simply what is stressed in the writing techniques; if nothing else, paragraph styles can bear a certain resembance to elements in a markup language. Moreover, once the finished result is published, often few people can tell which document was produced by which method.

My own belief is that people argue about these things so heatedly because they are minor, not because they represent radically different viewpoints. I've long observed that, the less important a topic is, the more intense disagreements about it are likely to be (if you've ever been in the middle of departmental politics at a university, you'll understand what I mean).

--
Bruce Byfield 604.421.7177 bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com

"Better fail in a grand style than succeed in a mean one - you won't enjoy the successes you get the second way."
- Fritz Leiber, "The Oldest Soldier"




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Techwriter's toolkits and "application holy wars": From: Bill Hall

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