Why marketing should make the user manuals

[Pinkham, Jim]

Hear, hear, Gene! You may not have to go any further than your nearest
newspaper to see this painfully lived out. As recently as a decade ago,
though old-style compositors where long gone, many papers still had
separate professionals doing layout and design. These days, the copy
editors have morphed into paginators as papers have slashed positions in
attempts to remain competitive. That front page you read may have an
hour or two or three of design and a half dozen stories with a combined
total of 20-30 minutes editing. Inside, it gets even worse. When the
time for editing content (versus manufacturing pages) was more
substantive, there was a much greater opportunity for quality. And IMHO
a lot less of the sloppy copy editing and proofreading so prevalent
today.

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+jim.pinkham=voith.com at lists.techwr-l.com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+jim.pinkham=voith.com at lists.techwr-l.com] On
Behalf Of Gene Kim-Eng
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 10:50 PM
To: Susan Hogarth; techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
Subject: Re: Why marketing should make the user manuals

It's actually worse than that.  The "ease" with which writers can now
*sort of* do the work of illustrators, page layout designers and
typesetters has resulted in writers being REQUIRED to do it, and the
result has been that many people in these fields have seen their
livelihoods dry up while the quality of documentation has fallen due to
writers having to divert time away from the important tasks of
researching the products they document to do the production work
formerly done with better results by others.

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message -----
From: "Susan Hogarth" <hogarth at gmail.com>

> At an auction, I came across a beautiful old 16mm projector. Didn't 
> buy it, because our house is too cluttered already, but the manual 
> alone was almost worth the price it went for (around $20, I think). It

> was -lovely- - slick B/W pages with -wonderful- drawings and diagrams 
> and beautifully written. The layout was beautiful - more polished than

> many books of the period (1950s, I think). I'm not a luddite, but I 
> wonder sometimes if word processors and layout software have just 
> enabled people to do things sloppily with more ease...

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