This thread has reminded me of the Varanus Is (WA) explosion now seven years ago. Was it a "pipeline" or was it "pipeworks" they were writing about all those years ago? The cost of not being consistent was hefty and the beneficiaries were the lawyers.
Bill On 24/12/2014 12:09, Stuart Burnfield wrote:
/You write with ease, to show your breeding, But easy writing's curst hard reading/ * Richard Brinsley Sheridan <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Brinsley_Sheridan> 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: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
