I feel obliged to chime in on this topic because I have many years of
experience working at system administration, Listsrev management, computer
help desk support, and a Masters degree in educational psychology.

Many people appear to lack a level of critical thinking with regard to
using computer software in the sense that they do not often seem to
extrapolate well. Technical software documentation authors also fail to
take this into account, and when they do, it often turns off those of us
who do know how to extrapolate well. This is also true in other fields.
I have seen far too many professors assume that just because they know
how to reason out a problem in their chosen field, that their students
who have little or no experience in that field possess the same level
of critical thinking ability in that field.

As an example specific to Listserv, I have noticed a lot of people when
they're told about Listserv's query command to not realize that the same
can be used in a way other than the one in which they were specifically
told (i.e., it has serveral different parameters). A lot of the trouble
with technical documentation can be solved simply by taking the time to
read through it ocassionally, not just when one needs to know something
specific. Reading through the entire set of documentation, while often
time consuming, does tend to give rise to answers to questions that the
reader has not even thought of.

One of the major strengths of Listserv's manuals is that most of the
information one could ever need in managing a Listserv and individual
lists is there and well explained, but its not provided in the context
that many people seem to require.

So I guess my point for the L-Soft developers is that you should avoid the
common assumption that non-technical people can employ the same level of
extrapolation that you do. It would be best if some outside help was
obtained in restructuring L-Soft's documentation, although the actual
content is good, its organization needs improvement. L-Soft would do well
to enhance the value of Listserv software by adding more examples,
including a detailed index, and restructuring the faq file so that more
topics are included and grouped in various ways via a table of contents.