[ARC5] R-10 in the receivers.

[Richard Knoppow]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Glen Zook via ARC5" <arc5 at mailman.qth.net>
To: "Bruce Long" <coolbrucelong at yahoo.com>; 
<mstangelo at comcast.net>
Cc: <ARC5 at mailman.qth.net>; "'Mike Morrow'" <kk5f at arrl.net>
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 10:27 AM
Subject: Re: [ARC5] R-10 in the receivers.


> One of the most difficult things for a person to do is to 
> write an article, manual, etc., for someone who has very 
> little, if any, actual knowledge of the subject.  It is 
> way too easy to assume that the reader has certain 
> knowledge and the author leaves out pertinent information 
> that is crucial.  When the author really "knows" the 
> subject, he/she often overlooks information that 
> absolutely needs to be included.
>
> For those who can easily write information to educate 
> persons with absolutely no knowledge of the subject, that 
> really does impart the knowledge, I have great respect.
>
> Over the decades, starting when I was a junior in high 
> school, I have written numerous magazine articles, 
> newspaper columns, historical articles (primarily Civil 
> War), and so forth.  I do hold over 1000 copyrights.  But, 
> the only technical manual that I have written was when I 
> was a senior at Georgia Tech and had established, and was 
> managing, the first portable and pager repair facility, 
> owned by Motorola, that was away from the Schamburg, 
> Illinois, plant.  That was a field repair manual on the 
> Motorola Pageboy pager.  The purpose of the manual was to 
> impart quite a number of basically "hints and kinks" which 
> allowed the technician to rapidly diagnose, and then 
> repair, the various circuits in the pager.
>
> Glen, K9STH
>
> Website:  http://k9sth.net
>
     A couple of stories:  During the time I worked for -hp- 
the company decided to try farming out some handbooks. They 
were awful and the practice stopped or, perhaps they found 
someone better.  The original handbooks were written with 
access to the designers. One problem was that as the 
industry progressed many designers worked on a particular 
project and moved on so were no longer available to the 
technical writer or, for that matter, to the servicing 
technicians at our shops.
     The other story was told to me by a friend who did 
technical writing. He worked for a well known Japanese 
company and had a lot of trouble with them. It seems that 
technical writing is considered to be very prestigious so 
the job often went to those who were high in esteem but not 
very good writers.
     Of course another problem is that often those who are 
part of the corporate culture do not speak or write English 
very well hense "Japlish". Even companies who had fairly 
good instruction books fell afoul of this.  I found there is 
also a cultural effect which I think comes from the nature 
of language and learning.  Japanese is a pictographic 
language requiring a prodigious exercise of memory to learn. 
In Japanese handbooks it is common to ask that a measurement 
be made and _remembered_ where in an American handbook one 
would be told to write it down.
     I have tried re-writing some awful instructions after 
working with the procedures they describe, Glen is 
absolutely right, its not at all easy.  Good technical 
writers are worth their weight in gold but I think often do 
not get the credit they deserve.

--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk at ix.netcom.com