Michelle why is it, when e-mail is supposedly such a casual form of communication that we use words--er, they use words like that.

Ah... this could be a whole show unto itself. With technology, I think one of the things that's happened is the sort of primacy of the people who know all of the big words in this particular field, 'cause it is one that so many of us are trying to catch up with and trying to adjust to, and to try and be able to speak that jargon. And so a lot of us are trying to learn words like "document" and so on because it makes us feel more comfortable.

Sometimes it depends: when we're talking about things like instructions, sometimes it is necessary to pick a certain word, even if it's a higher-level word, because it can't be construed as anything else. In fact one of the visitors we had was from Bombardier Aerospace, and she was talking about the fact that for example the user who is going to use a technical manual to repair an aircraft at thousands of feet in the air--the words that you use to describe the procedures have to have only one meaning in the context, and that meaning has to be understood by the folks who use these manuals to mean that thing only. So that when they have seconds to try and repair something and read the manual, there will be no ambiguity. For example, where it says "replace," does replace mean take out the old one and put in a new one? Or does it mean take out the one that's there, clean it, and put it back in?
And these things are vitally important.

But with software, oftentimes I think it's just that the people who are using these terms, they were created for that particular context, but the people maybe don't think about the fact that you, the user, are going to be thinking about it in a totally different context, and it's not going to be the same one that they were using in constructing the software. Um, there's a big problem I think in workplaces because there are a lot of folks--you know the joke is that the techies don't know how to explain it to everybody else--how to do something. And that's often where there needs to be an intermediary, such as a technical writer or communications person--for technical writers this is often what they do--who can come between the person at this high technical level to whom that makes perfect sense in terms of the context and the structures they're thinking in.

And I don't want to paint all software or all technology people with the same brush 'cause sometimes you get the instructions and they're really easy to follow. And other times it's just give up and I'm going to phone their toll-free number. But sometimes I've often found that the instructions are condensed and made very small--I guess to make them less intimidating--but then they're condenses so much to make them useless. And then if there'd been more information then maybe I wouldn't have had to plug in that telephone number.