Egoless writing: improving quality by replacing artistic impulse with engineering discipline

ABSTRACT

When technical communicators have a strong personal attachment to the publication they are preparing, this attachment may interfere with the design and testing of the publication itself. Documents developed by solo authors tend to be late, buggy, and exceedingly difficult for others to maintain. "Ego-less" methods---collaborative and structured---break the proprietary connection between the writer and the book; in so doing they permit the most powerful tools of engineering and testing to be used. But they also reduce the satisfactions of the communicator's job.

REFERENCES

• 1: Baard, P. (1994). Psychological fusion and personal conflict in organizations. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 37 (1).
• 2: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
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• 4: Roger S. Pressman, Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1982
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.1 Document and Text Editing
          Subjects: Document management

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Documentation

General Terms:
Documentation, Human Factors, Management

Keywords:
collaboration, documentation development, project management, teamwork