Manuals
Created | Updated Oct 20, 2010
Contrary to most schools of thought, manuals are interesting, informative and well written, not to mention stylish and dog-eared with years of loving use.
This proposition would be true were it not for the fact that it just isn't. And it's not merely untrue in the way that simple fibs are untrue; it's so astonishingly inaccurate that many people are, at this very moment, petitioning for this proposition to be allowed to stand for government.
The process of producing manuals is very complex. After becoming thoroughly familiar with the apparatus in question, teams of psychological experts utilize their meticulous and considerable experience of knowledge distillation, communication semantics and human expectation heuristics to produce a piece of documentation that is as close to useless as it is possible to get, without actually being advertised on a daytime TV shopping channel.
The measurement of skill that has gone into manuals can easily be judged by observing how close readers can be brought to thinking that they can successfully use one of the features of the apparatus as described therein. If they can be made to hold three or four different parts in tricky positions before being told that they now need to reach for a further component (which doesn't exist), so much the better.
The dog-eared appearance of many manuals is also a reflection of the pedigree of the writers. Dog-earedness is a phenomenon brought about by frequent testing of the publication for air-worthiness and impact survivability, often due to an inexplicably agressive and frustrated temperament on the part of the reader.
This proposition would be true were it not for the fact that it just isn't. And it's not merely untrue in the way that simple fibs are untrue; it's so astonishingly inaccurate that many people are, at this very moment, petitioning for this proposition to be allowed to stand for government.
The process of producing manuals is very complex. After becoming thoroughly familiar with the apparatus in question, teams of psychological experts utilize their meticulous and considerable experience of knowledge distillation, communication semantics and human expectation heuristics to produce a piece of documentation that is as close to useless as it is possible to get, without actually being advertised on a daytime TV shopping channel.
The measurement of skill that has gone into manuals can easily be judged by observing how close readers can be brought to thinking that they can successfully use one of the features of the apparatus as described therein. If they can be made to hold three or four different parts in tricky positions before being told that they now need to reach for a further component (which doesn't exist), so much the better.
The dog-eared appearance of many manuals is also a reflection of the pedigree of the writers. Dog-earedness is a phenomenon brought about by frequent testing of the publication for air-worthiness and impact survivability, often due to an inexplicably agressive and frustrated temperament on the part of the reader.
