RE: FWD: Looking for advice -- up to the job?

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

Just to throw in a couple of other ideas on top of all the good ones that have been posted (and I haven't read them all, so I may be repeating something that has already been said)...

I've worked with "slow" tech writers, and it has not been a great situation for anyone. But I have also know the same people to me enormously successful after migrating to related fields.

For example, I knew one person who was great at schmoozing, and he turned out to be a very effective salesman. He certainly did not know the product at the level of technical detail that was required of a tech writer (this was for system documentation, not user manuals). But he knew a lot more about it than other sales folks did.

I've known others who mastered the principles of instructional design and were able to be successful training designers and writers (as well as stand-up trainers) without having to sweat the details of language, usage, tools, etc., at the same level as tech writers do.

I've known people who saw themselves as slow because they were strongly right-brain-dominant. Once they moved into technical illustration or graphic design, they were very productive. I know another person in that same category who was GREAT at visualizing assembly procedures and specialized in documenting and illustrating them. Her grammar stunk, but nobody cared, because she got the instructions in the best possible order and saved a lot of frustration on the assembly line.

These are just some notions to drop into the "What do YOU want to do" hopper, FWIW.

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