On the Lost Art of Angrily Throwing a 1000-Page Manual Across the Room

This article was originally published as part of a series of articles on our LinkedIn page:

Hello world.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for ages, but to be honest, I never got around to actually writing anything. Well, let’s change that.

(Those who know me from other platforms will probably whisper “Lord have mercy on us all” now. But I’ll behave. Probably.)

Since 1989, I’ve been writing, editing, and translating product literature. Around 2013, I added multilingual projects (aka “The endless joys of cat-herding translators”) to the mix. Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the world’s best-known brands. Some are still with me every day, others live on only as fond memories.

This work has shaped a mental landscape full of setup, use, and disposal instructions — and the comforting thought that in thousands of recording studios and offices around the world, something I labored over for months was unboxed, admired briefly, and then shelved forever*. Rest in peace, 800-page German Opcode Vision 2.0 manual (1994–1995).

(Everyone has a dream. Yours might be a yacht. For technical writers, it’s someone actually reading every sentence, including liner notes and colophon, before throwing a tantrum because “the bl**dy app / reverb processor / monitor doesn’t work.” Hope springs eternal.)

Over the years, product literature has changed profoundly.

Manuals, quick guides, and support documents are no longer thick booklets tucked into cardboard boxes.

Back in the early 1990s, mighty FrameMaker – the software used to create the maintenance manuals for the even mightier Boeing 777 – came on fourteen 3.5-inch floppy disks (you can imagine my nerves fraying around disk #13) and with about 1,000 pages of documentation (created, obviously, in FrameMaker itself) – enough to build an armada of paper boats, if you’re into that kind of thing.

This was, as Marty McFly would put it, heavy stuff. And as a twentysomething obsessed with electronic music, I had the privilege of using this single-source publishing behemoth to write manuals for … music software! The kind where you could configure a Karplus-Strong synthesis module on a greyscale screen with the resolution of a modern smartwatch — and after 30 minutes of processing on an 8 MHz CPU, enjoy a one-second sample that sounded like a depressed android plucking a rusty guitar string. Magic.

Today, we don’t have the jetpacks and holidays on Mars that we were promised back then. But now, manuals and knowledge bases are created collaboratively, with input from product, marketing, legal, support, and (Let’s welcome our robot brethren!) large language models.

People still insist they “don’t read the manual.” Same as 30 years ago. Yet the “Product details” sections on Amazon product pages (now powered by Rufus, the friendly AI who is absolutely not plotting world domination, scout’s honor!) prove that humans remain curious, confused, and keen to argue about the mysterious red pinhole button no manual ever mentions. We are a species of tinkerers and storytellers, which is why entire communities can spring up around the Bluetooth pairing function of a €29 smart scale from Shenzhen — complete with a “BMI & Life Expectancy Prediction Module”.

Why bother documenting things at all? Why not accept the black box as such?

Because there’s a difference between just flipping a switch and actually mastering something — even if it’s just another step on a long ladder, aka yak-shaving. The journey is the destination. (For details, see page 499.)

Translation has evolved as well. We’ve gone from “document-centric” work (the 800-page tomes) to content that is reused and repurposed endlessly across print, web, social, and support channels.

In short: It’s time to rethink how product literature is created and delivered — and explore what smart tools and a bit of curiosity can do for us.