Re Lisi:
"No. The problem here is that the overlap between highly competent
technical
people (who find tech fun) and people who love writing, and find writing
fun,
is so small. I personally know one, and he is not a developer.
Developers
love developing. Writers love writing. Neither regards the other as
occupation as fun."
You do realize that coding implies hammering on a keyboard too, right?
:p.
I am a person who both enjoys writing documentation and writing
programs. I have been programming since the age of about 8 and since the
age of about 12 I was already documenting code and writing documentation
for the would-be users that never came about ;-).
Cause like, there was no internet anyway, and pretty much no way to
distribute anything.
For me there wasn't.
I question whether taking on some directed SoC project (a tutored
project on something you might not have chosen or come up with yourself)
as some forms of bug hunting might fall into that, would actually be
more fun (to me) than writing or improving documentation.
Bug hunting seems like a rather poor way to spend time to me. You'll
just be tracing someone else's code. That's not coding, that's
analysing. If anything, reading other people's code is not fun. To me it
isn't. I like creative developing much more than fixing stuff made by
others. How entirely tiresome that is!!!
Writing documentation on the other hand is easy, all of what you do is
probably gonna be on one page (or one successive document), you're not
hunting around for stuff, you can probably base yourself on stuff
written by others before you, which makes it less mentally tiresome,
since the data is already there and you only have to rewrite it or
reorganize it.
So miss Lisi, I don't know who you are, but I don't think your emphatic
"no" is warranted.
I don't believe in doing other people's work anyway, but just saying, to
me writing documentation or improving documentation seems like a lot
more fun than doing other people's obnoxious coding work ;-).
I can only see it happening if some university already gave courses on
technical writing though however.
Documenting someone else's code (or program) might not be fun, but
writing someone else's program may not be fun either.
"See my paragraph above. And then there is the educational system which
here
anyway tends to separate the techy from the arty very young."
In Delft there are master studies (and master courses) in which students
of two different branches have to cooperate. For example, in Information
Architecture there are joint courses between IT students and Business
students. Simply because it is about modelling organisations, and they
are good at both, or both are good at that.
So my question to you would be:
- Do you see this as being the case, or are you wanting this to stay the
same?
Because from your answers I would get that you very much enjoy this
staying the same. I mean, the separation you mention.
You seem to revel in this separation and that there are no technical
writers who actually enjoy writing while also being developers of some
kind.
Because you can do one of two things: keep things the same, or get this
rift to heal. The proposal by Richard Owlett was a proposal to heal the
rift, but you seem to be fighting that.
Because really. There is one thing that is always clear to me here.
The ones that are bad at writing also have attitudes that make them bad
at writing but that they will defend to the death.
The thread and the responses by Catherine Gramze is one example of that.
She defends bad writing. She comes up with all kinds of excuses as to
not want to explain anything. Saying it is Good to not explain stuff.
If you are going to say it is Good not to explain stuff, BAD WRITING
WILL ENSUE.
So if there is a dearth of good writers, it is because there is an
overabundance of bad attitudes. To writing. You try to convince me that
explaining stuff to new users is bad because you want your man pages to
be reference only material.
That is something only a bad writer would say.
And anyone saying that would become a bad writer.
It is a bad writing attitude.
It is providing justifications (and excuses) for your bad writing.
But more importantly, it is saying that writing badly is a Good thing.
If you stopped calling bad documentation Good, maybe something would
happen. If people in general recognised bad writing as bad writing,
maybe they would become good writers. Maybe they would become good at
it.
But if you insist that badly written text or badly written documentation
is actually good, well no small wonder then that there are no writers
who enjoy doing it. You hate doing it yourself. You defend badly written
texts. And you even attack writing that is actually good (even though
you may not even have seen it yet) because you cannot even imagine what
such writing would be!!! Cause you're a bad writer and can't do it
yourself!!!
Speaking in a bit of a general term here, not directing to anyone.
The problem is not that you can't do it. The problem is that you call
good writing bad, and bad writing good.
