Re: True Technical Writer

[Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca>]

Carol Peruzzi wrote:

> ... When
> they do the writing, I do change it, enhance it, tweak it, etc.  Many times
> (more often than not) I do the writing and have the programmer review it.
> My question is this:  What am I if I am not doing all of the "writing".  Am
> I considered a true "technical writer".

That sounds like technical writing to me. I've been at this a while and have
done different parts of the work on different projects.

	sometimes just editing things the developers wrote
	completely re-writing    "     "      "        "
	writing user or adminstrator guides
		based on specs or developer documents
		from scratch
	writing or editing the specs developers worked from
	writing or editing marketing material

No doubt there are a few more that I haven't done or don't recall.

In my current project,

http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.9/doc/index.html

developers write all the man pages

http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.9/doc/manpages.html

and I write everything else. I occasionally comment on the man pages, but
never edit them. If you have developers capable of doing this well, this
is a very good arrangement.

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