toohey opened this issue on Dec 16, 2004 ยท 37 posts
cedarwolf posted Fri, 24 December 2004 at 4:45 PM
Hmmmm...having taught technical writing a few times, I've found my vindication for my statement that "you never let the engineers write the manual. You give their working notes and a copy of the program to some enthusiast, let them blow it up or melt it down several times, make them take notes and write up the walk-throughs. THEN you let the engineers add the footnotes and the 'If you do THIS, then THIS happens..." sections. I had a student last year who wrote a sweet little bit of C++ for fantasy role playing and ran off all his customer base with the instruction manual and his explanations. I'm also in favore of folks like Dr. Geep writing user handbooks. Tech manuals are great for those who speak tech, but the rest of us need "real people" explanations for what to do. And I just love these forums! THIS is where I learned how to use Poser.