The cartoonist Scott Adams frequently uses the country of Elbonia and its citizens the Elbonians in his very successful Dilbert comic strip. The Dilbert cartoons make fun of corporate life and attitudes, and the citizens of Elbonia, a fictional less-developed country, are often the intended victims of unscrupulous corporate schemings. The Elbonians, however, are pretty resilient, often by being surprising literal in the things they say and do.
Elbonia and the Elbonians are devices that Adams uses to illustrate the attitudes and behaviours he wants to make fun of, and he does this with great success.
I am a great fan of the Dilbert series, and often laugh out loud at the latest cartoon, but this week there was a strip that gave me pause for thought. In
the cartoon published on 15th October 2005 an Elbonian has mistaken a software CD for a Frisbee(TM) and has complained that it doesn't fly properly. When told of his mistake the Elbonian replies "in my defense, the user's manual was poorly written".
This joke relies on the fact that everyone reading the strip knows, and seems to accept, that software user manuals are generally poorly written. That's a problem for me, as I'm a professional technical writer, and I have made a career out of writing user manuals. Why does everyone think that what I do for a living is always done badly?
The unfortunate truth is that quite often user manuals aren't very good or very useful. I believe that's because in many cases they are written by the wrong sort of people. In many software companies writing the manual is a low-status task left to one of the less experienced programmers. People who aren't professional writers may well understand the products they are describing, but what they don't understand to the same extent are the tasks that the end-users are trying to achieve with the software or the product. This means that although they may describe product features correctly, their descriptions aren't recognised by users as being in any way relevant to their jobs.
This is a great shame, as professional technical writers do aim to write the manual that the user needs, at whatever level of understanding they require. If your product's manual may fall into the stereotype highlighted by Adams's Elbonian perhaps it's time to look for a serious professional technical writer, perhaps one who belongs to a professional association such as the
STC or the
ISTC. Then your users may have a better chance of recognising your products and using them properly, rather than trying to flick them through the air!
