Technical writing antipatterns

I grabbed this screenshot from an amusingly unhelpful page of help documentation.

painful instructional design



  1. kristin nienhuis 8.12.08 / 9am

    can’t decide if i am “glad” to see this page or if I could have happily “existed” without… :-)

  2. Rhonda 8.12.08 / 6pm

    Looks like someone was writing for an ex-boss of mine! His ‘metric’ for my ‘worth’ as a technical writer from one release to the next was how many more pages were in Release 4, compared to Release 3.

    *My* metric for the same documentation was how many LESS pages there were. Fewer pages meant any or all of these:
    * tighter writing and editing
    * removal of topics no-one cared about or wanted, or that were repetitive of other topics (e.g. an ‘add widget’ and an ‘edit widget’ topic were often very similar and could be combined)
    * more usable software that didn’t require a 400 page manual to use it!

    BTW, I no longer work for that company—and nor does he!

Have your say

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>




Safari hates me