[Fwd: Re: Value of this list: one perspective]

[Rahel Anne Bailie <rbailie -at- NEWBRIDGE -dot- COM>]

Fellow techwhirlers,

The recent thread about the use of this list made me consider what I
value
enough to put up with 50 to 100 messages daily. Certainly, the
philosophical
issues interest me most, but these weren't what I saw when I looked in
my Tech
Writers email folder to see which files I'd saved.

The list, it turns out, is valuable to me when I come across tips and
tricks
that I can find out about elsewhere at a cost of hours of internet
search time
(installing Office 97 and 95 on the same machine), broad and specific
"how to"
sequences (tips for a 45-minute session on communications, getting PDFs
to open
at a particular page), new concepts (diagramming sentences), business
solutions
(storing archives on CDs), references to books I'd like to buy, the
"why" of
technologies (why screen captures are blurry when ... ), and my
favourite, Dick
Margulis' response to "bulleted lists" which turned out to be a much
larger
explanation of document design.

Discussions of broader issues in technical communication are certainly
of
interest, but generally I don't tend to keep those threads. Once I've
absorbed
the concept, I trust I will find references in the archives.

While I wouldn't miss the blatantly nuisance posts dropping off, I
suspect many
of us find the nuts-and-bolts questions and explanations helpful, if
only to
reassure us we're not the only ones wrestling a particular technology
for the
best quality or fastest output possible.

Rahel Bailie
Vancouver, BC


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