>You have my sympathy. Fortunately most of the business writing I've
>done has been for general audiences. Whenever I've visited the
>outskirts of technical or legal writing it has been a punishing
>experience. I have really come to view this stuff as performing
>unnatural acts on the English language.
Somebody's gotta do it, and it should be done well. I finally took the plunge and upgraded my Mac from System 9.x to OS X. It's amazing how much modern software does for you, setting things up with little or no human intervention, with onscreen help written in clear English. You hardly need any documentation. The hardest part is reprogramming your own reflexes - re-learning movements that had become almost instinctual. But there's not much you can do about that. The contrast with the manuals that came with my first computer, a Vector Graphic CP/M thing from 1981 is amazing. That was three looseleaf volumes filled with mimeo'd typescript and incompehensible prose. Thank god you don't have to contend with crap like that anymore.
Doug