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Subject:This thing needs a name From:"Dan Hall" <dhall -at- san-carlos -dot- rms -dot- slb -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 30 May 2001 08:46:52 -0500
'lo all,
Some background:
My current employer (Schlumberger, pronounced schlum-bur-jay {they're
French}) is a large company that provides fixed RF network services to
utilities. More simply put, we make electric, water, and gas meters that
send radio frequency signals to collection devices, that pass the data on to
a central Oracle DB. Utilities use the info from the DB to bill customers.
There are currently 7 million meters under contract.
Anyway, the important thing is that our audience is internal, and full of
technophiles: GSM geeks, database dweebs, web weenies, network nerds, and on
and on. Their language skills are, shall we say... mixed? Some are
reasonably able, others less so - some are ESL, and others (usually native
speakers) seem to believe that English has no conventions worth following.
All of these folks are required to write documentation of various kinds
(SOPs, specs, protocols, etc.), which we then edit, tweak, and massage into
usable form.
So...
After numerous requests, we have created a style guide to help lead these
folks to better prose. And now we'd like to find a catchy name for the
document, so that it's a easier sell to the more reluctant users. The
atmosphere here in this group is fairly relaxed, so all suggestions will be
considered (as long as they aren't legally inappropriate).
Any thoughts?
Dan Hall
Sr. Technical Writer
Schlumberger DDS Tech Pubs
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only
secret of style.
__ Matthew Arnold
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