17 07 2018
Policy and Procedure Documents Without Tears
If you are a professional writer in a corporate setting, and are extremely unlucky, you may be called upon to write policy and procedure (P&P) documents.
This is actually a good thing, for the company if not for you.
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Journalists, academics, and Wikipedia contributors have widely varying abilities to put together coherent sentences, but they all know this: Unless it’s a firsthand account, something stated as a fact, without a source to back it up, is merely an opinion.
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Have you ever been reading something and reached the end of a sentence, then had to start reading the sentence again because you forgot what it was about? Do you think it was simply because it was a long sentence? Or were there other reasons?
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If you’re like most professional writers, you avoid any math more complicated than balancing your checkbook. You might not even do that anymore, since you can just check your bank balance on your phone. A math-free life—how great is that?
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There is almost nothing as metaphorically, if not physically, painful as watching two people who don’t know what they’re talking about try to explain something to each other.
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There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when technical writing as a profession held a comfortable, well-established place in the development of products and software. At least, among mature organizations who understood the value that a technical writer brings to the process. Particularly in the software industry, technical writers could count on a fairly predictable routine that coincided with a development cycle that (usually) provided ample time to write 500-page user manuals, plus the online help topics.
