[trynewideas]

> Among professional tech writers and editors, "engineering documentation" is a pejorative phrase.

Not here. It's documentation written by and for a different audience, and it's valuable. As a professional technical writer and editor, I vastly prefer it over having engineers who won't write anything.

Tech writer value comes from adapting engineering docs for other audiences and use cases: identifying what context needs to be there (or doesn't), providing the value prop, demonstrating real-world workflows, presenting it in a broader narrative of productive usage, and finding ways to make it all confirmable and maintainable over time.

But we aren't (often) engineers, and we need those engineer-written docs as a starting point for our own understanding. I'd avoid ever being pejorative about that. The problem's usually with a culture — or leadership — that believes engineer-written docs are enough for non-engineering users, and that all any tech writer should do is proofread and publish them.

[mikelevins]

Your point is well taken. Consider my remark a bit of hyperbole--though I've definitely been in more than one conversation in which tech docs professionals described something as "engineering docs" with the clear meaning that it fell below some acceptable standard.