From the course: Technical Writing: Quick Start Guides
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Base your quickstart guide on your user manual
From the course: Technical Writing: Quick Start Guides
Base your quickstart guide on your user manual
- Do you want to hear the six most depressing words for technical writers? Here they are. No one reads the user manual. So sad but often so true. Technical writers spend months on a detailed, thorough, super helpful manual and it sits there lonely on a shelf or as an ignored PDF awaiting download. For most people, the user manual's just TL;DR, too long, didn't read. But there are two pieces of good news for us as quick-start guide writers. People will read the quick-start guide. You can't base your short, compact, quick-start guide on the long 75-page multi-chapter user manual. Here's a technique I will call, mine the table of contents. Simply print out the table of contents of the full user manual and start to mine it or read carefully through it. Pick out topics listed there that should be included in the quick-start guide. This mining exercise isn't as simple as it sounds. It's not just a matter of taking the Getting Started chapter from the user manual and calling it a quick-start…
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