Manuals that meet market demands

The greatest challenge you, the writer, will face when creating a manual is to design one that is used, a manual that the user loves, a manual with dog-eared pages, yellow highlighter and handwritten notes. Don't you wish your manuals would look as used as the yellow pages do after just one year's use?Yet, writers are also holders of manuals, many of which we do not use. Is there an out-of-date manual tucked into the bottom shelf of your bookcase, dusty with disuse? Do you know if it is even relevant anymore?The business community is littered with beautiful manuals, color-coded headings, amazing graphics—but they're useless, because the information is out of date. Sometimes it seems as though the writer had been trying to create a document like the U.S. Constitution, which has remained virtually unchanged in 200 years. Now there is a document that has stood the test of time. But it required 55 men almost 17 weeks to bring a document of 4,000 words to publication.Should we be striving for such immutability? Are we expecting to create manuals that will stand the test of time? Is this a realistic or even a practical goal? Or should we design our documents from the beginning for change?A manual is not a dead object, created once, then left on the shelf like a vase. It is a living, evolving document, that must be nurtured with new information, with new approaches. Without this evolution, it will die.