Article: Document or else

[Ned Bedinger]

Stuart Burnfield wrote:
> It's an interesting thought: if you've been compelled to provide
> information that you're desperate not to reveal, how would you go about
> documenting in a way that made it useless to competitors, while complying
> with the letter of the law?
>
> It could almost be an exercise in anti-techwriting--turn all the principles
> of good writing on their head:
> - provide hardcopy only in a font that's difficult to read or scan
> - no index, TOC, glossary or cross-refs
> - little or no topic structure (no chapters or subheadings)
> - no template and style guide and no editorial review, so no consistency
>
> If active sabotage seems too Machiavellian, you could probably achieve the
> same effect just by making 300 unwilling junior software engineers work
> overtime on the documentation for weeks on end...
>   

In this light, I'd be skipping past the guilty pleasures to dive 
headlong into that good old-fashioned German schadenfreude. See 
wikipedia's translation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude


Ned Bedinger
doc at edwordsmith.com