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I've been thinking about this since yesterday, and I think the role Bill
pointed out is key:
Bill Buckheit wrote:
>I don't think that what techwriters do is simply regurgitate or duplicate
>other people's work. I feel that our task is to ferret out the information
>that our audience needs and interpret/translate it into a form that the
>audience can understand and use.
We're interpreters. It's as if the engineers and the users speak two
different languages. The information may already exist in the world of the
engineers, but until they learn to speak it in plain English (or Spanish, or
Dutch, or whatever...)instead of Techie, or the users learn to speak a
foreign language (because Techie seems like that to a lot of users),
someone's going to have to translate.
As technical writers, we need to be able to communicate with both sides in
their own language. The research and learning part of each application is
familiarizing ourselves with a specialized subject so we can use
industry-specific terms without sounding like idiots (in the same way as
described in the Pretentious Writing thread). Language interpreters have to
do this too.
Just my opinion.
Rosemary
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