The toughest part of being a technical writer is the 2% of the job in which I have to be creative. I have no problem with creativity in general, of course. I do, however, have a problem with thinking inside the box.
If you’re a junior whatever at a cube farm, don’t let anyone fool you into thinking outside of the box. Trust me, it’s just a catch phrase invented by corporate automatons to make themselves feel like the ordinary crap of their job is actually an intensely creative experience.
No, those briefest of moments in which you think creatively must fall within well-defined boundaries of a corporate taste. That is, all good ideas fall into the same marketspeak meatgrinder, where it’s turned into an easily-digestible, homogenious paste before being spoonfed to upper management from a gold-plated tureen.
Please understand that I’m referring to companies in general. It’s the nature of product design and marketing to render all brilliant concepts down to their most meaningless essence.
So, thinking within the box, I need to come up with a title for a new user guide. Most guides, as you have seen are cleverly titled “User Guide”. That’s a difficult one to top, but I plan to try. If the product is Wxyz, maybe we could name it
Learning Wxyz
Getting to Know Wxyz
Everything I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned from Wxyz
Wxyz: Your New Best Friend
Wxyz for DFUs
Wxyz: RTFM
Getting that Warm, Fuzzy Feeling with Wxyz
Wxyz: A Reason to Keep Living
Wxyz User Guide: the Paper Thing that Makes the Box Feel Satisfyingly Heavy