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Re: What do you assume as basic audience vocabulary?
Subject:Re: What do you assume as basic audience vocabulary? From:Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 24 Jan 2001 13:48:12 -0500
Kathy Frost wrote:
> Technical manuals seem notorious for forgetting this, but I try to remember
> that most people who use the index are new to the software. I use a lot of
> See references with anything I think the user might call something, ...
Yes. I once made a bunch of users very happy by including terms like DASD
(Direct Access Storage Device, what IBM mainframers called disk drives) in
an index for a microcomputer product.
Up to some very high limit, the more ways you provide to get to the data,
the better:
At a minimum:
table of contents
index
lots of cross-references
Often other lists or tables with pointers to doc sections:
common problems
major product components
error messages
One extra that is sometimes worth adding is a permuted index. This takes each
section title and turns it into an index entry under each word in it. For example,
"Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" gives three entries:
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
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