Re: Career-changer portfolio questions (plus one additional question)

Subject: Re: Career-changer portfolio questions (plus one additional question)
From: Jen Harvey <jenharvey -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 23:12:33 -0500


Hi, Ethan:

It sounds like you're well on your way to creating a good portfolio.
If you're interested in software technical writing, you may also want
to consider volunteering to write documentation for an open source
project. It's a great way to accumulate portfolio pieces while proving
your technical salt (not to mention earning the eternal gratitude of
open source developers!).

Sourceforge usually has a slew of documentation "help wanted" projects
open at http://sourceforge.net/people/.

I don't necessarily agree that, as others may have suggested, your
lack of prior explicit experience as a technical writer or a lack of
technical writing courses under your belt is a barrier to your being a
successful technical writer. In my opinion, the best technical writers
are those who put forth the effort to thoroughly understand the
technology they're writing about and are able to distill that
knowledge into clear, concise, and accessible documentation. It's
something that I'm not sure you can train for--you either have it or
you don't (based on your initial post, my guess is that you do!).

On the Japanese vs. Chinese language question: In the last few places
I've worked, Japanese has always been the first (and in some cases,
only) language we've translated into, so maintaining a focus on
Japanese may not be a bad idea. :)

Best of luck to you!

Jen

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