action or subject

Pretend you are a user for a second, and not the technical writer. When you read a manual, do you, personally, want an action/task or subject oriented arrangement?

Over and over it is drilled into our little TW heads that everything should be action-oriented because the users are reading your prose to get something done for their job.

Maybe this is an overy-geeky opinion, maybe it's just me, but I don't think this is a fair assumption. I'm reading about a technology that I'm interested in and have background in. I don't really want someone to tell me how to do my job, I want someone to tell me the theory, all pitfalls noted and let me piece together my own procedure.

I can't be all alone here.