Essay Awareness Essays This is the third in our series of professional awareness essays, in which a *JCD commentator calls attention to what he or she regards as interesting and documentation-relevant recent trends, problems, or publications in some related field. Rethinking the Author-ReaderRelationship in Computer Documentation Mary B. Coney, University of Washington Carl S. Chatfield, Microsoft Corporation Introduction he domain of literary theory, inhabited by scholars of poetry, fiction, and belles lettres, may seem far afield from the world of computer documentation, peopled by technical writers, usability experts, and computer pro grammers. But from a rhetorical point of view, these two fields of study and practice appear more similar than not: both are concerned with producing manuals that convey information intended for specific purposes to an audience who is largely unknown to the author and who will use a manual under sometimes unpredictable circumstances and with unforeseen consequences. No matter how much a novelist might think she understands the group her story is intended to reach or how carefully a usability expert has researched her potential users, there is always and inevitably a gap between the actual people who make up the audience for a particular manual and
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Rethinking the author-reader relationship in computer documentation
Coney, Mary B.; Chatfield, Carl S.
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 20 (2)
Association for Computing Machinery – May 1, 1996
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