Re: You're not the only person who can write

Subject: Re: You're not the only person who can write
From: "T. Word Smith" <techwordsmith -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 08:29:03 -0800 (PST)

Well, okay, I'll buy that for a dollar.

But (you were waiting for the "but," right ...
professional technical writers also know about the
profession of writing.

We know about press, online help, html, text versus
vector versus raster, layout and design.

Point in case: a friend of mine was on a project. It
was unlike other projects--it was for a new software
product. The product documentation content was to be
outsourced to some well-educated engineers ... PhDs.
These guys could write.

But ....

My friend (a technical writer) was not included in the
specs. The specs were based on a printed book written
for another product. But, the printed book represented
only about 40% of the documentation content for that
project. The online help had the rest.

So, the PhDs wrote the content using that book as an
outline. But, they didn't really pick up on its
structure.

What was received was written well, accurate, but
didn't flow well for the uninitiated. More to the
point, there was no consideration for an index, TOC,
glossary, or ... online help. The content was not
organized to put content into place for use in a
context-sensitive help project.

I don't think my friend really liked that project very
much, at all.

And, my point is being able to write well and being
able to write good technical documentation for a
specific purpose and the process of organizing your
content and writing for a purpose and audience is
something that even those who write well don't have
... it takes some experience in the matter, some
training and education, and mostly some interest in
being a professional technical writer to bring those
skills together.

So, I say let the SMEs write--some may need more
editing than others. But, don't let the engineers do
technical writing; they don't have those skills and
are not interested in working to get those skills.

No?

--- Goober Writer <gooberwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
>
> > Are you the pants or the depends?
>
> LOL! Excellent post, Andrew!
>
> To take this a step further, a technical writer's
> job
> shouldn't be "to write". If you're looking for a job
> "to write", those days are long gone, my friend.


=====
T.

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References:
Re: You're not the only person who can write: From: Goober Writer

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