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<blockquote data-quote="John Roberts" data-source="post: 82581" data-attributes="member: 126">Re: Why? Is RTFM a secret?Having written a few owners manuals I&#039;m tempted to apologize for the entire genre, but I won&#039;t. Most owners manuals are written by junior technical writers (if lucky), with more complex products written sometimes by actual product designers. Engineers are notorious for being poor communicators so some of these manuals can be classic examples of such failures to communicate. Others are guilty of flawed translation. Lucky for most of us reading here, we get the english original. Try to imagine a marginal OM after it gets translated into another language. The need to provide multi-language OM, rewards the manual writer for keeping the descriptions simple and free of jargon. Since the translators are typically more expert in the language than the technology. (Describe a pad simply, without using the word pad).&nbsp; While I may be one of the few people who actually reads owners manuals before firing new gear up, i still think it mostly comes down to good product design (ergonomics). I still remember an old (Teac?) small mixer I borrowed to use at a trade show decades ago, and I had to take the back off of it and trace out the circuits to figure out how to get signal through it (because I didn&#039;t have a manual).&nbsp; :-(JR</blockquote>

[QUOTE="John Roberts, post: 82581, member: 126"] Re: Why? Is RTFM a secret? Having written a few owners manuals I'm tempted to apologize for the entire genre, but I won't. Most owners manuals are written by junior technical writers (if lucky), with more complex products written sometimes by actual product designers. Engineers are notorious for being poor communicators so some of these manuals can be classic examples of such failures to communicate. Others are guilty of flawed translation. Lucky for most of us reading here, we get the english original. Try to imagine a marginal OM after it gets translated into another language. The need to provide multi-language OM, rewards the manual writer for keeping the descriptions simple and free of jargon. Since the translators are typically more expert in the language than the technology. (Describe a pad simply, without using the word pad). While I may be one of the few people who actually reads owners manuals before firing new gear up, i still think it mostly comes down to good product design (ergonomics). I still remember an old (Teac?) small mixer I borrowed to use at a trade show decades ago, and I had to take the back off of it and trace out the circuits to figure out how to get signal through it (because I didn't have a manual). :-( JR [/QUOTE]

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