old school

[Beth Agnew]

While many of us claim to be that long in the profession, two good 
examples of historic technical communication that I share with my 
students are the following:
1. Hymn to Ninkasi - circa 2000 BC - a beer making instruction that 
includes phrases such as "You place appropriately on [top of] a large 
collector vat." The word "appropriately" definitely marks this as 
technical writing. We tell people precisely how to do things.
2. God to Noah in Genesis - (date disputed) - instructions for building 
some kind of big boat that apparently was successful in keeping the 
user, his family, and assorted cargo from drowning. "And this is the 
fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be 
three hundred cubits..."

Another contender is the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which gave 
instructions on how to reach the afterlife. User testing has been a bit 
sporadic on that one though.

Personally, I think technical writing is the Second Oldest Profession, 
and quote Moliere: "Writing is like prostitution...First you do it for 
love, then you do it for a few friends, then you do it for money..."
--Beth

Sam Beard wrote:

>Back when *I* first started, we were on this project to build a tower
>that would reach the heavens! The work was progressing well, the specs
>were all drawn up and all parties signed off on them, the use cases were
>ran and all users were identified and their roles assigned. Us tech
>writers had completed the construction manuals and were working on the
>operating specs when suddenly we could no longer understand each other!
>All of our hard work now seemed like Greece (and Abyssinian and
>Pheonician and all of the other languages that came about from this
>project!) to the entire team, so we hard to start all over again! Talk
>about a major re-write!
>
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