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Friday, December 01, 2006

Ah, Mockery 

There are times when companies hang themselves on their writing and get the mockery they deserve. This is one of them. I like particularly the quote the newswriter took from Dell Inc.'s "simple" statement. It's worth reprinting.

UMA delivers a layered framework that enables a path to "built-in" management for hardware and software using standard instrumentation such as CIM and SMI-S, and access protocols including WS-Man. The result is a cross-vendor approach that can yield more robust systems modeling, enabling high availability and standards-based building blocks for business process management.

Did you get all that? The test is tomorrow.

It's easy to mock tech writing because it is so bad so often. One wonders when the industry will learn to write clearly -- perhaps never.

Tech writing is difficult. I've done a bit of it and made my share of mistakes. I'm lucky, however, in that my colleagues won't stand for dense sentences and will force me to explain what I thought I had written clearly. Perhaps the answer is always to have someone on staff who knows little or nothing about technology and to make that person the final editor of copy.

Someone might suggest that to Dell.

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