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> This should be a constant reminder to all tech writers
> to NEVER assume a user knows something.
Would it were that easy! But telling users hundreds of things they do know
is just as bad as not telling them things they don't know. All too often,
documents are unusable simply because the needles are hidden in bigger and
bigger haystacks.
>From a purely practical point of view, you cannot assume complete ignorance
on the part of the user. You have to assume all sorts of shared knowledge
even to begin a communication.
It is important to remember that written communication is always an exchange
between two educated people, and that it is essentially a partnership in
which both persons have obligations.
We cannot write everything to the lowest common denominator. We need
documents that are written with a high level of assumed knowledge, and the
obligation of the reader of such a document is to repair any deficits in his
knowledge before he reads the book. The obligation of the writer is not to
make unreasonable or arbitrary assumptions about what the typical educated
audience for his book knows, and not to leave out things that are essential
to the subject he is presenting.
Audience analysis is essential, but it can, at best, give us a picture of a
class of users, and the attributes of that class will not all be true for
any one member of that class. We have to accept that some part of our
audience inevitably does not fit the user profile.
Often, we will see documents that have been extended and extended over and
over again in response to every complaint or misunderstanding until they
become a complete and unreadable muddle.
We do not properly fulfill our responsibilities to our readers if we do not
hold them to their responsibilities as well.
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Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com
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