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--- On Thu, 11/20/08, Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com> wrote:
>
> > If having "personality" injected into the
> final work
> > does not harm the value of the work, why bother?
>
> I recall a glancing discussion here about
> this that arose because someone wanted
> to use the word AND to mean OR with the
> explanation that 'back home we all use it that
> way.'
>
==============================================
= OK, that I would agree is too much "personality." It seems to me
= the other person's statement shows he (or she) is choosing the wording
= to use in a technical document for a decidely non-technical reason.
= When I think about "personality" in a technical document I mean
= something on the scale of choosing whether to use serial commas, or
= putting punctuation inside or outside quotation marks.
==============================================
>
> Call it personality or culture, sometimes our quirks
> are not as transparent as we think they are, and that is
> the best reason I know to pursue a selfless (objective?)
> style in tech
> writing.
>
==============================================
= That is a useful observation and a telling point in making people
= understand why it is necessary to have work proofed and edited by
= someone other than the original writer.
==============================================
>
> > What would be the virtue of having a document written
> > in such a manner that it is totally impossible to
> > discern any human element in the writing?
>
> Personally, I could enjoy good documentation written or
> assembled
> by a computer.
>
> In fact, I'm planning on getting out of tech writing
> just as soon
> as computers can do it. The human dependency intrigues me,
> and the
> English language sure seems to have that, but some day, ...
>
==============================================
= I really think that day will never arrive. True computer-generated
= writing would require a very precise model of how the writing mind
= works. Writing a computer program that can write would require
= programmers to have a thorough understanding of the human mind, and how
= it writes and reads. (Warning: tongue in cheek argument follows). In
= other words, it would require a detailed knowledge of human psychology
= by a group who are famously unable to understand other people.
= Seriously, how many times have we heard some programmer say something
= like, "If the user interface is intuitive enough you don't need any
= documentation." They haven't gotten things to that point yet, and even
= now there's still nothing like that on the horizon. I think there's no
= danger of us being replaced by computers in our lifetimes.
==============================================
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