Hi All,

This is to let u know my position as a technical writer, in fact i have ended to become a WRITER and EDITOR!!! Why? Simple, such is the fate of the TWs in a service based company. Every stuff related to writing is on my desk, ranging from an employees profile to managing the stuff in the monthly e-newsletter. FRUSTRATING!!! Having learnt all the tools has just been waste of time and money. This is not what i alone am facing, even my friends...

The NYTimes.com is seeking a technical writer to write end-user and reference documentation for in-house staff and NYTimes.com users. The Associate Technical Writer will also assist with other projects as needed, including internal developer documentation and API documentation.

Reports to: Technical Writer

Responsibilities:
•Write and edit online help, user guides, quick-start guides and reference documentation for in-house CMS and other tools

Normally, a faux pas implies uttering words that shouldn't have been said. They're words that should never have left one's mouth, at least not at that particular moment. For example, gloating about the longevity in one's family, in the company of someone who's recently suffered the premature loss of a loved one, could be considered a faux pas. On the other hand, boasting about habitually exceeding the speed limit to one's neighbor—who also happens to be a cop—is less a faux pas than an incomprehensible lapse of reason.

About three years ago, after working in journalism and finding it not my style, I took a technical writing class on a whim during my Masters studies and fell in love with it. So three years later, here I am, two years into my technical writing job with a software company. As much as I love my job, there is much that also frustrates me.

I am currently a contractor working for a large energy company. I have been tasked with writing specifications for a DataBase Administration team for a new Oracle High-Availability project.

My issue is that I am having great difficulty extracting the needed information from the team to put into the documentation and explaining to these individuals what is needed.

We have an outline with particular sections of the document assigned to specific groups and individuals, but they "just don't have the time" or "forget" to send me anything.

OK, I admit, I am probably just discouraged.

In my last long-term job of 10 years, things reached a point where everyone said, "you know the topic better than we do" and I received little or no corrections. Or there was the typical product change with tons of corrections the day after the document got signed off... the usual.

I've been contracting in a different locality, and am stunned...

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Looking back on it from yesterday's vantage point, last week had such a dreamlike quality that I wondered if I had been in a coma. Looking back on yesterday from today's compos mentis vantage point, I now understand that I wasn't in a coma at all. I was in a comma.

In investigating how much "time and effort" my colleague and I exert when teaching online, we realized that we did not have a clear idea of the difference (if indeed there is a difference.) Any thoughts? When we evaluate our work in industry or the academy, do we mean "time" when we say "effort" or do we mean "time" plus added expenditure of energy or something else? Ideas and thoughts welcome!

Continuing yesterday's exhaustive discussion of the Sony ICD-MX20 recorder I'm using for input to my speech-recognition software, it may be worth clarifying my use of the term high fidelity in the decidedly lo-fi context of human speech. In the larger realm of hi-fi audio, this recorder's 60-13,500 Hz frequency response is laughable; it's a far cry from the 20-20,000 Hz response that defines the minimum qualifications of any recording or playback equipment suitable for the world of music.