Repartee wrote:

The placing in shoes part seems very hard to master. I've tried to read a number of computerish manual like thingies that may start off "A bit is like a domino - if the domino stands on edge it means one and if it's flat it means zero ..." and a few dozen pages later the writer is assuming I have prior knowledge of the hierarchical network model.

Based on my firsthand experiences, the worst writers for such publications tend to be the experts in the field, who more often than not are not actually writers at all. For one, they lack the required distance from the subject to be able to explain it in simple terms. No doubt they are brilliant at what they do, but they are not professional communicators and as a result hopeless at explaining something in layman's terms. You can blame the publisher or the manufacturer for such failures because they didn't assign the best person for the job, and then didn't have a layperson read a draft of the material to verify that their target audience would understand it. As beak correctly points out, it's a perverse cutting of corners, which I'm sure ends up costing companies far more money down the road when their support team has to deal with all the confusion that the poor documentation generated. 

Uwe wrote:

Based on my firsthand experiences, the worst writers for such publications tend to be the experts in the field, who more often than not are not actually writers at all. For one, they lack the required distance from the subject to be able to explain it in simple terms. No doubt they are brilliant at what they do, but they are not professional communicators and as a result hopeless at explaining something in layman's terms. You can blame the publisher or the manufacturer for such failures because they didn't assign the best person for the job, and then didn't have a layperson read a draft of the material to verify that their target audience would understand it. As beak correctly points out, it's a perverse cutting of corners, which I'm sure ends up costing companies far more money down the road when their support team has to deal with all the confusion that the poor documentation generated. 

Heck, man - I don't care whether it's written for a "layman", I just want it to be logically consistent! If the text starts off at a dead simple level as if it were talking to a sixth grader then I expect every intervening concept to have some explanation when it is first introduced on the way to more complicated concepts! It's just common sense. I wish I could be assigned as a "lay" reviewer of such things, since I would certainly point out that the author went from condescending right back to talking to his peers without any intermediaries. 

But I guess that is pretty much what you are saying. If there are any reviewers at all they are probably peers of the author and since they know the material already they can't see the gaping holes in the exposition.