On 8/22/2010 7:29 AM, Jerry wrote:
On Sat, 21 Aug 2010 09:51:12 -0700 Marc Perkelmarc@perkel.com articulated:
When you write software you never have to learn it so you don't have the perspective of someone who never heard of it before and wondering "what is this?" That has always been the problem when the instruction books is written by the products designer/creator, software or otherwise. This is why many commercial distributors hire outside consultants to write their instruction manuals.
I was briefly involved in that field as a part time adventure. Unfortunately, the powers that be all to often considered that including all possible scenarios would make the manual overly confusing to the novice user. Plus, as both IBM and Microsoft learned the hard way, nobody RTFM anyway.
I have always been of the opinion that colleges who teach technical writing should hook up with open source developers and have their students write the docs for the project and work with developers on feature requests and do tech support. It would be win/win because they would get a good education and open source software dovs would greatly improve.
I had the same problem when I was a commercial software developer. I never had to learn it so I knew too much to do the docs right. However since I was doing my own support I quickly realized that if there were questions the users had that weren't covered in the docs, I added them to the docs. Saved me a lot of support effort.