Human factor -- still important

In this day and age of mega-total-automation we tend to forget the human labor that goes into every word, every package of meaningful information.

Here is a video title from CNN Fortune website.

An accident that really happened because someone was too tired to type "An accident" correctly.

The idea is not to nitpick on human frailties but to call attention to the continuing importance of quality labor and human expertise which will be important even in the year 4008.

You can automate quality up to a certain point. But after that, there'll always be a need for well-trained people who do their jobs well.

A Manual for $20,000

Sometimes it's not easy to price a technical writer's work. How much is a user's manual "worth", really?

It probably is not worth much if it is one of those thick door-stoppers gathering dust at the top shelf of a never-used library.

However, it might also be worth billions if it shows a technician at a nuclear plant how to stop a core meltdown in progress.

Here is a rather well-priced manual that I've read quoted in the Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2007).

Natasha Pearl runs a New York lifestyle-management service. Among her services is finding top-quality kitchen personnel for her wealthy clients.

Ms. Pearl reportedly charges $10,000 "to find a chef" "and up to $20,000 to draw up a housekeeping procedural manual for a mansion."

As Sinatra says in one of his immortal songs, "nice job if you can get it..."

Power of FRAMEMAKER Markers

There is a reason why professional technical writers authoring long complex documents almost always use FRAMEMAKER.

There simply is no comparison between FM and MS Word, for example, when it comes to industrial-strength heavy-duty documentation with multiple levels of numbering, indexing, TOC, multiple lists, etc.

One look at FM’s Marker functionality, and you realize right away how deep its marking capabilities are.

Here are just some of the markers you can use to tag your FM text with:

Index – the most obvious one, used for indexing terms.

Pending – used for not-quite-finished items that you would like to revisit at a later date.

Conditional text – used to generate multiple versions of the same document geared towards different audiences or markets.

Glossary – used to tag the items to appear in a Glossary.

Header/Footer – FM easily creates running headers and footers from existing paragraph tags. But if the text that you’d like to convert into running headers/footers is not styled as paragraph header, you can select that text and tag it with this marker.

Cross-ref – used to identify any text as a cross-reference to appear in the Cross-Reference dialog box.