atw: Re: Visibility of documentation efforts
- From: "Stuart Burnfield" <slb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 12:09:16 +0800
You write with ease, to show your breeding,
But easy writing's curst hard reading
* Richard Brinsley Sheridan [1]
And easy reading's curst hard writing _and _analysis.
The trouble is that information that's wrong or ambiguous or
incomplete usually looks right at a casual glance. As Christine says,
it can take a lot of skilled effort to turn true-looking information
into true information, but that effort is invisible to the unskilled
eye.
The jigsaw puzzle is a good image, Christine.
--- Stuart
----- Original Message -----
From: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To:
Sent:Wed, 24 Dec 2014 12:34:12 +1100
Subject:atw: Re: Visibility of documentation efforts
Really good question and it goes to the issue of how do we place a
value on tech writing at all. For me, writing is not really our key
skill. Research and analysis are critical.
I had one manager look at the work that I had taken months to
produce, and say “if it’s this easy, why did it take so long?”
My immediate manager was fortunately on-side and snapped back, “Only
Christine could have made it look this easy. No-one had any idea
what was going on before she sorted it out.”
Unfortunately, the better we are at our job of sorting out messes and
making things look easy – at which I am very good – the worse our
PR efforts. We find ourselves having to convince others of what a high
level of skill it takes to make the complex look simple, without
crossing the boundary into simplistic.
In hindsight, while writing this, a jigsaw puzzle flashed into mind,
but a puzzle without the box lid to help guide the building of the
jigsaw. A jigsaw can take a short amount of time to do or a very long
time to do, depending on the size of the pieces, the relative
complexity of the image, how many pieces were missing and had to be
hunted for or replaced, etc. We meticulously sort through all the
pieces and put them together into a coherent picture. We then
present is the finished picture to others and they get to see the
picture for the first time. That picture might look simple, but that
is not the critical variable when it comes to how long it takes to get
to that finished picture. It takes as long as it takes.
Links:
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[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Brinsley_Sheridan
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