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In my experience, a narrative of the UI is seldom confused with task
oriented documentation.
For example:
Using the Widget Dialog Box
vs.
Ordering Widgets.
The former is generally written by someone who has taken the design
specification and blindly written a topic for each element of the user
interface. Often without understand the audience or purpose of the
feature. While the latter is often written by someone who has asked
the question "What is the user *doing* with this new dialog box?" and
then written the topic accordingly.
I've seen narratives that went on for pages and pages without a break,
describing everything you could possibly do on a screen, without ever
once telling you WHY you'd want to do them. I've also seen procedures
buried in paragraphs, where you would never think to look for them.
I've seen multiple procedures under the same heading (Creating
Framistans, Modifying Framistans, Deleting Framistans, all lumped in
together!). I hope nobody is teaching that to new technical writers.
As far as I know, these sins were all committed by people who fell
into writing documentation but didn't have any formal training.
One of the reasons why I'm such a big advocate of training.
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