One way in which documentation short-circuits questions and critical reflection is the strict division typically maintained between "tool" instruction and "conceptual" instruction: Online documentation normally offers instructions for tools (how to indent a paragraph, how to change a font from one family to another), but ignores conceptual instruction. A potential reason for this ignorance is the fact that such pedagogical discussions would have to admit that writing was not easy, a position that flies in the face of the the image being portrayed. Early online documentation stressed brevity--not merely in sentence structure but in the sheer amount of material provided--because of diskspace restrictions. But given the demands of the latest version of Microsoft Word, for example-nearly 20 megabytes, and I didn't do a complete installation--it's hard to believe disk space is still an issue.
In many of our own classes, we take up this discussion in the form of pedagogy-discussion of layout, the processes of writing, etc. And it could be argued that the machine will never be able to replace a human teacher. But documentation in general is founded on the idea that one cannot always have a teacher physically present. We write textbooks, design handouts, pair students up with one another for peer critiques. Duin and Gorak's Writing with a Macintosh represents a move in this direction by combining functional instructions about a specific word-processing program with more traditionally pedagogical information about the processes of writing. And other writing texts are beginning to include word-processing software, but these arrangements are far from the norm or very well integrated. We should recognize that even when computer-supported advice is not without its own problems (style-analysis programs, for example), we should also work to help reconstruct these supports because they will be there whether we like it or not.
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