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Re: Article: Document or else

Subject: Re: Article: Document or else
From: Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 20:55:09 -0700

Stuart Burnfield wrote:

It's an interesting thought: if you've been compelled to provide
information that you're desperate not to reveal, how would you go about
documenting in a way that made it useless to competitors, while complying
with the letter of the law?

It could almost be an exercise in anti-techwriting--turn all the principles
of good writing on their head:
- provide hardcopy only in a font that's difficult to read or scan
- no index, TOC, glossary or cross-refs
- little or no topic structure (no chapters or subheadings)
- no template and style guide and no editorial review, so no consistency

If active sabotage seems too Machiavellian, you could probably achieve the
same effect just by making 300 unwilling junior software engineers work
overtime on the documentation for weeks on end...

In this light, I'd be skipping past the guilty pleasures to dive headlong into that good old-fashioned German schadenfreude. See wikipedia's translation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude


Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com






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Re: Article: Document or else: From: Stuart Burnfield

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