In a series of publications, Edmond Weiss describes the change in both programming and technical writing from an artistic craft to an engineering discipline. The change brought numerous benefits to the users and readers, to the programmers and writers, and to the companies they work for. In exchange for those benefits, Weiss says, writers had to give up control over the content and format of the documentation. They also lost the esthetic pride of creating a work of art and the personal satisfaction of teaching and protecting the reader. Weiss anticipates a future in which technical documentation is generated automatically and the technical documentor's job is merely to feed information databases. In the conclusion, I note a few differences of opinion, but overall I agree with Weiss's view.
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Consequences of the engineering approach to technical writing
Waite, Bob
Follow ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
, Volume 26 (1)
Association for Computing Machinery – Feb 1, 2002
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