RE: What is More Important?

[Yves JEAUROND <jingting -at- rogers -dot- com>]

What's with this American Idol stuff? :-) Why must there be a single winner?
  TW is a team effort of skills; a molecule, not an atom, not a boxing match.
   
  Technical writing is a part of the arts--to those who differ, may I point
them to the engineering group. Sure there are technical aspects to
  our work: grammar, punctuation, logic, clarity. And when HTML is
  involved, or macros or printing, then we need those technologies
to service our art. Make no mistake: afterwards, the result of our art
 then serves the product's science, business and marketing...
   
  And because TW is part of the arts, then the rules of art criticism apply:
  what is better art? Note the "better", not "best"; good art adds to a corpus.
 It doesn't "win" over other art. Is my manual better than a play by Shakespeare?
  Well, yes and no. Hamlet seems to have more endurance :-0
  My manual seems to have more pertinence :-) Northrop Frye makes that
point in _The Educated Imagination_, as do many other literary critics.
   
  The question makes no sense because each item is a "sine qua non": 
you need technical accuracy AND writing skill PLUS a bunch of other stuff:
  (1) avoiding literary figures of speech in TW, which means being familiar
     with rhetorical devices.
  (2) knowing how to appear thruthful to readers which means being familiar 
     with the forms truth can take (concepts like precision, accuracy,
     cogent communication)
(3) knowing about document design...
  (4) knowing what makes a writer tick... 
  (5) knowing about business constraints...
  (6) knowing your audience...
  And so on.
   
  So what is really more important? A writer that doesn't know about
 business constraints can the most exact and engaging writing,
but will fail miserably if he's overbudget and past deadline... 
   
  What is important is awareness and competency in as many of
the components of the art of TW as you can handle. If its only one thing, like
technical accuracy, technical support will love to hate you.
   
  Stop thinking that it's a competition, a war, a manicheism; TW is a liberal art,
a composite. It is just as silly to ask what is more important about stained glass:
  the lead frame or the colored glass?... or the light shinning through?
 They are all needed. 
   
  My two cents,
   
  YJ
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