Let me make this perfectly clear

Nixon used to say that phrase a lot, didn't he? It was right up there with "Make no mistake", and "I am not a crook".

Can it be true that manuals are written as part of a corporate strategy to wrest yet more after-purchase money out of the consumer's bony fingers?

Currently, I'm trying to assist a friend in another state who is having a problem getting his VCR to record or play back anything that comes via the new cable box service he has had installed. I think that video manuals and instruction sheets hold the record for being the least well written documents.

I suppose the companies keep their costs down by writing documentation that takes little note of the end user. The quick start guides that show the cartoons of how things get connected often seem to leave out certain facts, such as the ones that show optional gear as though it were part of the standard setup. The optional gear is the stuff that actually makes the rest of it do what you bought it for in the first place.

This, of course, makes after-market revenue almost a certainty, and the rates for such personal attention vary all over the country.

Even though most of the manuals for installation and setup are now available on the web, that just means that it's more convenient to find this miserable collection of poorly-written, myopically printed documentia. And while we all appreciate that it's there, we still can't get past the fact that it doesn't say what we want to know, which is, in simple terms, How do I get this damn thing to work properly without my having to go back to college?

Well, it comes down to the fact that the young generally do not understand the needs of the elderly. Unless they've had first hand experience of no experience, they can't possibly write a manual or prepare a tutorial that starts at Square One and step-by-steps it through everything it takes to make it happen.

After all, the technical writers of today were born in the generation that had a computer in their home. And the next ones will have them in their brains. They have little in common with us: their documentation is rife with assumptions about what we know, based on what they have always known.

And then there's the matter of English as a second language, but let's not get into that here. Generally, these manuals seem to have been translated word by word, choosing the first, not the contextually applicable, meaning for each one.

My friend just wrote that he's thinking about telling the company to take the gear out and return things to the way they were. And I just wrote back that I believe he has found the solution. Corporate America doesn't lose customers willingly.

And for any of you out there who may be technical writers, don't take this personally, but just as a favor to me, will you please read "How to Give Instructions" from Lifehack.org. Dustin Wax, the author, has a wealth of good ideas. They're not hard to understand. So why are they so difficult to do?