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Subject:Re: H/W v S/W difficulty From:Jan Boomsliter <boom -at- CADENCE -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 15 Nov 1994 09:37:08 -0800
Cannot compare two such different animals.
Software-only houses are a different world: different business
practices, different marketing strategy, certainly a different
audience. What is presented, how it's presented - completely different
from hardware and low-level software.
It never made sense to me that hardware writers were put on a pedastal
(by software writers, and others, in hardware or hardware-and-software
businesses). I think hardware is a piece of cake; you can get your
hands on it. Understanding software requires more than general
knowledge.
==============================
>Writing for hardware is more difficult.
>I did hardware tech writing for a long time, I've recently started to do
>software tech writing.
A lot of what you say is true, but I think you're also comparing large,
complex, inaccessible hardware with simple software.
Some software is large, non-linear, and inaccessible. Some hardware is small
and simple. Documenting a microprocessor's instruction encoding can be a lot
simpler than describing a modern publishing package.
As someone pointed out a while back, nobody ever learned Word 6 for Windows
completely from the manual, because an adequate manual would be too
difficult to write. ...RM
Richard Mateosian Technical Writer in Berkeley CA srm -at- c2 -dot- org
