RE: Teaching a practical business writing class and looking for professional rubrics

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

voxwoman was heard to say:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
[snip]
> > One of the most commonly heard complaints about tech docs 
> is, they are hard
> > to read because they are so boring. Many have content that 
> is so repetitive
> > it is mind-numbing. Too many are full of pages that look 
> exactly the same
> > except for the difference of a few words. They keep using 
> the *exact* same
> > phrases over and over until the reader is sick of seeing 
> them. You can
> > actually make documents painful to read with excessive consistency.

 
> A case-in-point is the book *HTML, XHTML and CSS (Visual 
> Quick-Start Guide),
> *by Rob Huddleston uses the exact wording for every CSS 
> command, and in
> about 5 cases, didn't  bother to update the text from the 
> previous command,
> so that the text didn't even apply to the section. It was 
> very disappointing
> to see that in an expensive published book.

"Disappointing" would be an understatement. Troubling for 
other reasons - you'd wonder what _else_ the lazy author 
had ignored / let slide / got wrong. 

You'd also wonder what you were paying big bucks to a 
big publishing company for, if not ... what was that 
ancient and disused word again? ... oh yeah... editing. 

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