Writing Technical Documents for Computer Beginners
Grokdoc I asked a professional technical writer, to write about what would make this project really useful. Here is his response: Writing Technical Documents for Computer Beginners by Nicolas Richards The first rule of writing technical documents is to know your audience. This means more than a mental acknowledgement of who you are writing for, and then plowing ahead in your usual style. It means crafting your words to suit your audience, even if your audience thinks in wildly different ways from the way you think. Consider the plight of the help desk. The person manning the phone knows quite a bit about software and hardware, but the person calling in may not. How many times has a problem been reported to a help desk that couldn’t be solved until the person taking the call dialed down the probable causes to a level commensurate with that of the caller. “Is the monitor plugged in? No? Ah, well plug it in now. Is it in? It works now? Wonderful. You’re very welcome.” ...