What is More Important?

[Mary Arrotti]

Some really good comments on this thread but I particularly like what Stuart wrote here. The ultimate measure of a writer's success is the documentation. Or to phrase differently - the proof is in the pudding. 
   
  What does it matter if you are a technical expert in your industry if your audience can't get what they need from your docs? 
   
  The best & most highly skilled writers I've known continue to work on improving their skills in every aspect of their responsibilities. It's not enough to be the best one in your group in one category - instead, you should be learning from others - not positioning your skill set as being "more important."
  

Stuart Burnfield <slb at westnet.com.au> wrote:
  I'm with those who think that this question, as it's worded now, can't 
be answered meaningfully.

There are things that matter other than being technically accurate and 
well written. If any of these can make it harder for readers to 
understand a concept or complete a task, how is it meaningful to pick 
two factors and ask which is more important?

Here's a thought experiment: imagine you have asked ten representative 
users to test a procedure. Two testers complete the task successfully in 
a reasonable time. Four testers complete the task but it takes them a 
lot longer. The other four testers don't successfully complete the task. 
You talk to all the testers and discover the following:
- one component was labeled incorrectly
- one instruction was ambiguous--it could be read two ways,
one right and one wrong
- one tester took over three minutes to find a relevant topic;
another tester didn't find it at all.
- a table was formatted using a smaller font that one tester found
too hard to read
- the diagram on p33 appears to contradict the text explanation on p32
- only three of testers understood that the terms 'node' and 'host'
sometimes referred to the same thing and sometimes to different
things
- the instructions are correct if you happen to be operating in
console mode but not if you happen to be in log mode
- in one very long and complex sentence, it was hard to tell whether
a step had to be done by an operator or a by supervisor or if it
would just happen automatically

There are a lot of problems here. Some are problems of technical 
accuracy, some are due to poor writing, some are neither. In what way is 
it useful to say that the technical problems are more important, or the 
writing problems are more important, or that the technical and writing 
problems are more important than the others?



       
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