Woo, a pretty cool article entitled "Tech Writing in the Age of Open Source" on reallylinux.com. Overall a good read, and I'd like to comment on a few of Mark Rais's words.

1. The Reader Feedback Loop. I believe that all TWs want user feedback. We want to make our work that much better, and the only way to learn how to improve is to elicit reader feedback. What Rais fails to realize is that in business and non-personally-motivated communities, most users are likely to grumble and move on after experiencing poor documentation. They aren't paid enough to share what they think.

2&3. This is based on the assumption that your organization delivers its documentation primarily via the web. In all of my experience, this has not been the case. Maybe it's different for other people.

4. Lots of points here:

• Timing over perfection. I agree 100%, although Rais fails to realize that if you produce imperfect, technically inaccurate and misleading documents, your company can be held legally libel. OSS escapes this challenge.
• "Although this emphasis on 'exceptional grammatical quality' may be a worthy trait, it is a worthless cause." I could not agree with this more. Good grammar is important, but devote a worthy amount of time to it, please! I think after years in the biz, we learn how to write in a quick, streamlined manner that gets around most grammatical challenges.
• Honestly, TW projects usually lag behind the software development projects by a week or two at most. If this lag can be accepted (which I think it can in any context), I think that the timing issue isn't really so important. I’ve never seen documents lagging behind the software by months…
• I don't know about this active voice nonsense, I really don't. All of my life I was taught that active is stronger than passive, and it certainly makes sense to me. Is Mr. Rais confusing person and voice, when he discusses what a global audience requires? Certainly globalized English is important to know. Does anyone out there have any tips on how to write this way?

technical writing, technical writer, documentation, OSS, linux