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RE: Anyone Can Write - Just Look At The Job Descriptions
Subject:RE: Anyone Can Write - Just Look At The Job Descriptions From:"Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 8 Aug 2011 11:34:12 -0400
The whole question of respect comes down to values. Different professions
have different value systems, and they judge the value of their work and of
other people's work according to the value system of the profession. Thus
engineers often have contempt for technical writers, and technical writers
often have contempt for engineers because their values don't match.
The real problem is that both the values of engineer and the values of
technical writers don't tend to match up particularly well with the values
of customers, or the values of companies. Indeed, the values of engineers
and technical writers (even more so) tend to be positively hostile to the
commercial values of the companies that employ them.
There is, of course, great commercial value to clear communication. But
there is no commercial value to the correct use of the subjunctive, or to
the parallel structure of bullet points. To be sure, many engineers write in
a way that would make Jane Austen purse her lips, but do the infelicities of
their style actually make a commercially measurable difference. In most
cases, no.
The problem with what engineers typically write is not that they are not
prose stylists on a par with Evelyn Waugh, but that they write about a lot
of stuff the user is not interested in, and fail to write about a lot of
stuff that the user is interested in.
That is the commercial value that really matters: what does the user need to
know? If you figure that out, and if you can make a convincing case for it
to product management and engineering, you will get plenty of respect and
cooperation. If you spend your time kvetching about typos and sentence
structure, you will be seen as driven by a set of values that are of
secondary importance at best to engineering and product management -- and
you will get no respect.
It is utterly pointless to complain that engineering and product management
don't care about our values; if we want to be respected, we need to
demonstrate that we care about their value, and that we can make a positive
contribution to them. Communicate to your audience in terms they understand.
That is writing 101. Why do we forget it when it comes to explaining
ourselves to our colleagues?
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