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Subject:RE: A wee story for you... From:"Christensen, Kent" <lkchris -at- sandia -dot- gov> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 19 Jun 2001 09:01:09 -0600
re: Don't even pretend that your documentation situation should take
precedence over a global corporate high priority issue. (Bill Swallow's
derived lesson from Plato's story)
This is kind of good advice, but it should be remembered that Plato's story
involved internal company workings and just providing on-the-shelf
documentation for running an internal process. Many times, I'd suggest, the
tech writing can indeed be a global corporate high priority issue--times
where the writing is a significant interface with paying customers being the
obvious example. The issue wouldn't, of course, be something like which
tool or how many backups to make, but, again, something that affects the
customer.
Yes, there may be a bit of a lesson to be learned from this story, but
mostly it's about an unfortunate personality disorder and how to persecute
(pay back) someone suffering from same and it's about a comparatively
insignificant "documentation situation," given external customers were not
really affected. The task in telling this story is to emphasize the lesson
and not the personalities.
Problem is, there isn't much of a lesson. Certainly I could provide nearly
the same lesson by suggesting something like "stop writing TECHWR-L to bash
Word" (or some other tool). Those messages are a near equivalent acting out
that constitutes inappropriate interruption in much the same way as the
behavior described in Plato's story. Office politics and payback and tools
preferences can be discussed here for sure, but I much prefer discussion
around successfully pleasing our readers. It shouldn't be so much about us,
IMHO.
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