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Re: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years (Long and V ERY Worth It)
Subject:Re: Hi-Tech Company Hasn't Used Tech Writers in Years (Long and V ERY Worth It) From:"Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sun, 26 Oct 2003 19:06:18 -0500
Gene Kim-Eng wrote:
> When I worked in the defense industry, our common practice was to never
> allow anyone in the Tech Pubs group to work on an entire document.
> with the engineers
> (us) having to sit down at one of the word processing workstations after
yet
> another formatter had assembled the final document to manually replace all
> the nonsensical placeholders we'd inserted into the drafts
What an excellent refutation to the notion that you need subject matter
expertise to be a technical communicator! These tech writers not only
lacked expertise, they were fed the wrong data, too!
I suppose the distinction is that the tech pubs group served as editors and
formatters while the actual "writers" were the engineers and developers. But
that only strengthens the argument that there is a font fondler role that
adds value to SME data, in certain situations. Otherwise the engineers would
have done it all themselves.
Of course, the whole dynamic sounds a bit dysfunctional to me. I'd be
surprised if anybody was really happy with it. On some level everybody had
to realize a team set up like that really isn't performing at the highest
level - they weren't Being All That They Could Be.
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