Re: Tech Comm Survey - Literacies of the field

[Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>]

Literacies of the field. Didn't Sidney Poitier star in that one? [It's 
still Friday somewhere, isn't it?]

What kinds of literacies (shouldn't that be either "what kinds of 
literacy" or "what literacies"?) does one need to be a successful 
professional in tech writing?

Well, like so much else, it depends. Certainly one needs to write 
literately. That is, a writer should be able to form sentences and 
paragraphs that native speakers of the language can read without 
wincing. A tech writer should have a certain degreee of cultural 
literacy attuned to the particular field in which he or she is 
writing--know the argot well enough to know when the target audience 
would find it pedantic and condescending to spell out an acronym or 
define a term of art. In many fields a tech writer should possess 
sufficient mathematical literacy to spot obvious errors in equations and 
calculations; enough engineering and scientific literacy to avoid making 
grammatically correct but factually absurd assertions; enough computer 
literacy to make sense of code, even in an unfamiliar language; enough 
business process literacy to draw a credible flowchart or org chart; 
enough graphic arts literacy to produce a readable, if utilitarian, 
document; enough software literacy to put together a Web site, design a 
simple database, construct a spreadsheet, .... What was the question, again?





ccrim -at- unmc -dot- edu wrote: