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Jun 6
The sexy side of tech writing
I'm spending a few weeks working on site with a client where one of my office mates seems to spend most of his time calling round used-car dealerships looking to buy a second-hand Mercedes.

I was reminded of him today when I read an article in the New York Times about the new 2007 Mercedes Benz S-class. And I'm relating this on a blog about tech writing because the article in question actually mentions the 700-page (!) owners manual that comes with the car.

"In my case, this [problem] led to opening that telephone-book-size manual to try to understand the nature of an ABC Malfunction. (By the way, ABC stands for Active Body Control, a system that is supposed to adjust the suspension automatically for optimal handling.) While thumbing through the manual, I wondered why some clever engineer hadn't figured out a way to let the driver know what to do when the car is having an alphabet-related problem. Certainly a descriptive warning message would be more useful than the PCMCIA slot in the dashboard."

The writers who worked on that guide must be feeling especially pleased with themselves. Not only is the work in question being mentioned in the New York Times, but I also imagine (like the writer of semicolon) that working on a document like that must be a lot of fun. Certainly more so than many of the software manuals it has been my pleasure to wrestle with other the years.

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