In Vacant or in Pensive Mood

One weekend, I was trying out a feature I didn’t quite understand in my computer, and so I clicked the ‘Help’ link. A popup help window opened, and as I was reading through it, I found myself constantly thinking about the technical writer who must have published it. The faceless, nameless author of the Help content would have put in several hours of research, relentlessly pursued the developers and SMEs (subject-matter experts) for information, made over a hundred calls, and sent an equally overwhelming number of mails to clarify details. At the same time, this technical writer would have also had to deal with a pushy project manager from the developing team who believes that technical writing is the simplest job in the world, pressing deadlines to the writer’s face without giving a second’s thought to the fact that he himself couldn’t, if he tried, write to save his life! While the usual claim is that the Help document looks simple and understandable, and so must be easy to write