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More to the point, I've thrown out and rewritten from scratch lots of
docs that were nothing but a narrative, illustrated walkthrough of the
UI. They didn't tell anyone anything beyond what they could see on
screen.
The problem was with the writers, not the design of the products. That
was partly the result of the dot-com boom, when just about anybody who
wanted to be a tech writer could find a job, even if they weren't
capable of understanding the technology.
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Chris Despopoulos
<despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
>
> I hope I'm not saying that procedures are obsolete or that we have no use for them in our writing. What I want to say is that we have to reconsider what it is we call a viable procedure. Robert Lauriston says it all... He finds lots of docs that tell him what he could have figured out on his own. Obviously, the docs were not aimed at him. If he's the typical user, then the docs are a waste of money to the degree that they took time and effort to explain the obvious. ...
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