Re: Is a tech writing degree best? Was:TECHWR-L in the News

[Wayne Douglass <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM>]

Chuck Martin wrote:
>In the years since, I've taken what I learned in that class and ran with
>it, trying to learn more and more on my own about interface design
>concepts. It helped me see that technical writing is about so much more
>than just writing, that communication is built in to the products we
>document, whether it be computer software or a complicated machine or
>the simplest of VCRs.

In this profession, as in many others, you never know what you will draw on
from your education to help you do your job. With an undergraduate degree
in journalism and a PhD in English literature, I have relied on different
courses and experience, depending on the circumstances. Currently as I
write about our search engine, I find myself recalling a linguistics class
I took in 1968 to understand how the underlying algorithms of our code make
it possible to extract meaningful data from the documents that are indexed.
(BTW, it is a tribute to the instructor of that class that I still remember
what he taught.)

--Wayne
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Wayne Douglass        phone: 408-542-2139
Verity, Inc.            FAX: 408-542-2040
894 Ross Road        mailto:wayned -at- verity -dot- com
Sunnyvale, CA 94089    http://www.verity.com
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