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> Am I the only one who sees value in knowing more than you need to tell
> your audience, or do others out there really think that knowing only the
> information your audience needs is a bonus?
Bonus? No. Disqualifier? No.
I agree with your statement that
> Every technical writer has to be able to put herself in the
> appropriate frame of mind for the audience, whether that audience is a
> junior-high-school-graduate-computer-newbie or a
> super-power-user-digital-god. If you can't write for your audience,
> you're not capable of doing the job, and being "non-technical" can't help
> you with that problem.
However, there is so much that is new in our profession, that few can claim
to have the necessary knowledge across so many different specialties. If you
specialize, you can become your own subject matter expert, at risk of your
specialty becoming obsolete.
As an independent contractor, my specialty is whatever project I'm working
on at the time. I may not have known anything about it previously, but I do
a crash course in the topic as soon as I know I need it.
For example, I had never used UNIX until the current project I'm working on
right now, an Administrator's guide for a telecommunications management
project. To get a grasp of some of the concepts (such as security, named
pipes, inittab, cron, etc) I installed Linux on my home PC over a weekend
and played around with the areas I needed to know. Sure enough, by the next
week I had a list of intelligent questions to ask the developers about the
product. I'm currently dissecting man pages on the individual services and
constructing an overview that apparently hasn't existed for this product.
Prior knowledge of a system or technology is obviously an advantage, because
you don't need to take the time to get acquainted with it. But having a good
attitude and not being afraid to dive in and tinker can quickly overcome the
limitation of not having that prior knowledge.
Being resourceful and a quick learner is more important than knowing the
specifics of a system.
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