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

Subject: RE: Teaching a practical business writing class and looking for professional rubrics
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
To: voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:37:39 -0400


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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Follow-Ups:

References:
Re: Teaching a practical business writing class and looking for professional rubrics: From: Nancy Allison
Re: Teaching a practical business writing class and looking for professional rubrics: From: Keith Hood
Re: Teaching a practical business writing class and looking for professional rubrics: From: voxwoman

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