"Know thy audience"; was: RE: What is "well Written"?

[Ned Bedinger]

John Posada wrote:
>> predictors of actual perfomance in the field.  The fact that
>> most technical documentation (and often the products
>> being documented as well) are not subjected to these tests 
>> and instead is thrown out into the field untested to sink 
>> or swim does not make it "art."
>>     
>
> Couldn't have said it better, and in fact, I object to calling what
> we do as an "art"

I appreciate what you're saying, John and Gene, and to a certain extent 
I agree with John that art isn't sufficient to explain what we do, but 
IMHO it is necessary to explain what we do. We don't wear berets and 
critics don't talk about the aesthetic value of our output, but we do 
plenty of creative, synthetic design.

Many job descriptions I've seen have listed some sort of information 
synthesis as a job duty, and while I find that requirement to be 
hopelessly vague (do they mean like "Make something up"?), I do count it 
as a clue pointing to conceptual creative work as an element of our job 
description. We synthesize appropriate verbal models of our target 
products, and there's art in that.


> Instead, he wantd to be known as a craftman. A craftman, as a chef,
> needs to be ready twice a day, evey day. He cannot pick when to be
> "on" and when not to be.
>   

Only a tempermental artist would say something like that. But if he 
prefers to be known as a craftsman, I think that is a tribute to 
hardworking artists.

> A craftman produces based on skill, process, training, and must be
> able to replicate the same level of skill every time.
>   

If artists recreated the same inspired piece over and over again, I 
guess they'd become craftsmen. But when did they stop being artists? The 
boundary seems to be fluid, and possibly just a semantic glitch. Anyway, 
many artists work and practice their skills every day, with or without 
artistic inspiration. Don't they?