The retreat from usability: user documentation in the post-usability era
ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
How to Write Usable User Documentation
How to Write Usable User Documentation
Egoless writing: improving quality by replacing artistic impulse with engineering discipline
ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
A unified format for language documents
SLE'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Software language engineering
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In a series of publications, Edmond Weiss describes the change in both programming and technical writing from an artistic craft to an engineering discipline. The change brought numerous benefits to the users and readers, to the programmers and writers, and to the companies they work for. In exchange for those benefits, Weiss says, writers had to give up control over the content and format of the documentation. They also lost the esthetic pride of creating a work of art and the personal satisfaction of teaching and protecting the reader. Weiss anticipates a future in which technical documentation is generated automatically and the technical documentor's job is merely to feed information databases. In the conclusion, I note a few differences of opinion, but overall I agree with Weiss's view.