Re: Humor as a communication technique -Reply

[Lisa Comeau <COMEAUL -at- CSA -dot- CA>]

Although I am not inclined to agree with Andrew's comedy/documentary point per se, I am inclined to agree that in *some* types of documentation, humor is more effective than facts only.

I'm not talking about zany Three Stooges humor, or Eddie Murphy "Raw" humor, I'm talking about the interesting "notes" and "asides" that give the reader a chance to read them or not, like information about the software developers coming up with the idea while riding go-karts...(nevermind, long story)

I don't know about you, but when I'm reading a 500-page manual on a software program, I appreciate those little boxes to the left with some kind of icon telling me thast the contents are superfluous. Then, when it's time to crack down an' learn, I can ignore them, and when I need a brain break, I can get a chuckle.

I have to disagree with Lisa Higgins (sorry!) when she says:

SNIP
...it is ALWAYS a bad idea to put anything superfluous--background information, tangential stuff, cute analogies, jokes, etc.--in what I call 'angry docs.' 
SNIP

but only because she refers to 'angry docs', and I believe that this is the type of documentation we want to aviod  anyway. To me, the term 'angry docs' refers to those "non-user-friendly" docs we discussed in an earlier thread.

She also said:
SNIP
This includeshelp files and any sort of last-resort documents that nobody's going to look at until they've been struggling with a problem for an hour and are ready to put their fist through a wall. Nothing is funny to
these guys.
SNIP

This part I pretty much agree with, but I think maybe I didn't make myself clear as to what type of documentation I was *personally* thinking of. From my perspective (writing manuals for MS Word, WordPerfect, GroupWise, and so on that I use in a classroom setting that I teach in), humor in the manuals coincide with the humor I use in the classroom, and as a result, the people I facilitate for (let's be PC about it) learn more, and as a result, I have to do Less Support! YAY!

Best example I can think of where humor helped rather than hindered was my first experience teaching an introduction to PCs course which was attended ONLY by women. About half of them couldn't grasp the order of parts of a PC in importance, and as a result, couldn't understand a newspaper ad for a system. 

I used the acronym PMS i/o (Processor, Memory, Storage, input/output).  I won't get into the whole lesson, but the PMS part worked in this situation, and I have been called back on a regular basis to teach similar all-female classes and they have all heard of the acronym I used, so I get asked for it all the time.

Just another case of "Know Your Audience". 

My other $2 worth...
I used to have an open mind, but my brains kept falling out...
Lisa Comeau
IS Super-User/Trainer
Certification and Testing Division
Canadian Standards Association
Rexdale, ON
comeaul -at- csa -dot- ca