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--- Andrew Plato <intrepid_es -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> The overwhelming need right now is technical writers
> who are not afraid of
> technical issues. I have literally hundreds of
> resumes of writers who
> claim "senior" level writing status and cannot even
> handle the most simple
> of technology issues. The "ignorance is valuable"
> mentality simply doesn't
> fly any more.
Someone coming out of college will probably not sell
themselves as senior level. I think it is completely
unrealistic to expect students fresh out of school to
understand serious technical issues. Perhaps it's
because I've been out of school for almost 10 years
and don't know what "kids these days are learning",
but when I graduated, I knew the basics of using a
Macintosh and a Unix machine and I had a PASCAL
programming course under my belt. That's it. My main
skills was writing. If you're hiring recent graduates,
you're probably looking at their grades, the types of
courses they took, their overall ability to
communicate, and their potential for learning -- not
how technically savvy they are.
I agree that being a technically savvy tech writer IS
helpful, but it is certainly not required. The whole
idea of being a tech writer, IMHO, is that you don't
HAVE to know all that technical stuff. You know enough
to get the gist of things, ask intelligent questions,
and figure it out.
> Were I designing your course, I would focus
> intensely on working with
> extremely complex information. How to understand
> basic technical designs
> and issues. How to organize information and build
> context. How to deal
> with engineers. And most important, the 5 golden
> questions:
I don't quite agree. But then again, I don't know the
big picture goals of this course. I think most
technical knowledge is learned on the job. But I say
that because that's how I learned mine.
$.02,
-Kathy Marshall
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