Re: Occupational hazard of techie tech writers

Subject: Re: Occupational hazard of techie tech writers
From: Win Day <winday -at- IDIRECT -dot- COM>
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 16:18:30 -0500

At 04:13 PM 10/31/98 -0500, Carl Stieren <carls -at- CYBERUS -dot- CA> wrote:
>Hello Colleagues,
>
>Are you a techie tech writer or are you someone who manages techie tech=
> writers?
>If so, what do you think of this analysis:
>

I'm about as techie a tech writer as is possible -- I'm a chemical
engineer. To me, hardware isn't computers, it's pumps and compressors and
heat exchangers. If you don't get dirty playing with the equipment, you're
not an engineer! <grin>

>Anyone who is really into technology, and who becomes a technical writer,
>has advantages and one big occupational hazard:
>
>Advantages:
>
>* ability to understand complex systems
>* ability to learn how to use the functionality of new software even when
>parts of specs are missing
>* ability to analyze a system and reduce it to its basic concepts
>* ability to compare totally new methods or functions to existing languages,
>protocols, systems
>

Except many, many, MANY tech writers do not write about software or even
computer hardware.

You can apply most of the above to equipment specs or design specs for
refinery operating units, which were the first technical documents I ever
produced...

>Occupational hazard:
>
>* inability to explain software or functionality to a beginner (sometimes
>even the inability to realize that you NEED to explain the software to a
>beginner)
>

Here I must respectfully disagree. A lot of what I write is geared for
either refinery operators, who might not be well-educated and for whom
English is not their first language; another large portion of my documents
are targeted to upper-level managers: business folks, bright and
well-educated, but hopelessly non-technical.

And I manage to communicate with them just fine, thank you very much.

<SNIP>

>We're told we can assume a certain level of knowledge, but unfortunately,
>every one of our users is going to have forgotten some of the basic concepts
>necessary to use any advanced software. And each person's forgotten concepts
>are different from another's. Therefore, we have to include those concepts
>somewhere in our documentation. We can't take too long explaining them or
>other users will get impatient (not to mention our supervisors, who are
>paying our salaries to document our products, not basic concepts).
>
>Therefore, there's a problem. Any brilliant technical writer who's into
>technology and hasn't done a lot of technical writing is going to produce,
>as a first draft of a first project, a document that will fail usability
>testing.
>

Again, I disagree. The first thing I learned formally as a tech writer was
how to do an audience analysis and why. If your audience truly consists of
such a mixed bag of skills, there are tricks and techniques for structuring
your document to be usable by both the novice and the expert. Or, better
still, you produce more than one document!

Win
-----------------------
Win Day, Technical Writer
Mississauga, Ontario

mailto:winday -at- idirect -dot- com

http://webhome.idirect.com/~winday


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