Certainly there are situations where humor in manuals, or going off topic, is quite valuable. The SimCity manuals (and most other good gaming manuals) are great examples. While they are discussing how to build roads a side note discusses Roman road construction.
An Engineering manual (or some IT manuals) would be terribly thick if this happened though. An occasional play on words that makes you laugh is all that should be allowed in these cases. Who needs a 1000 page book to be 1500 pages?
And lastly there are the manuals that fall somewhere in between. The key in these situations is to use non-distracting jokes that let the reader ignore them if they want. The big PUN jokes aren't fun the third time you reference the material.
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Certainly there are situations where humor in manuals, or going off topic, is quite valuable. The SimCity manuals (and most other good gaming manuals) are great examples. While they are discussing how to build roads a side note discusses Roman road construction. An Engineering manual (or some IT manuals) would be terribly thick if this happened though. An occasional play on words that makes you laugh is all that should be allowed in these cases. Who needs a 1000 page book to be 1500 pages? And lastly there are the manuals that fall somewhere in between. The key in these situations is to use non-distracting jokes that let the reader ignore them if they want. The big PUN jokes aren't fun the third time you reference the material.