Re: Trends in Tech Comm

[John Allred <jack -at- allrednet -dot- com>]

Steve,

I agree with your gist. My thought has always been that the style of 
writing documentation, as we think of it today, came about during our 
period of rapid industrialization and borrowed initially from both the 
scholarly, pedantic style of academia and the very formalized style of 
business writing of those times. It was either scientific in tone and 
voice, or an affected business style. I doubt there was any concept of 
"end user" like we have today.

While an educated or technical audience might prefer a highly precise, 
technical, and dry, style of writing, your typical end user, I think 
it's fair to say, prefers a somewhat more casual style that implies the 
writer has a personality and is more "like" the reader. Isn't that sort 
of the essence of Apple? The "for the rest of us" attitude?

John Allred

On 2/2/2012 9:42 PM, Steve Janoff (non-Celgene) wrote: