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I am not a contract writer. In fact, I've been a regular 8-to-5 Tech Writer
for 23 years now with 6 different companies and can count the times on 1
hand that I've had contact with customers. (I am not counting Rockwell
during the B-1B project. The Air Force people were paid to come talk to us,
which is why the 800+ manual set cost too many millions of dollars.)
I am not trying to be calloused or contrary, but I really don't see the
point. I don't write manuals for the user. I write manuals for the company I
work for. As long as the engineers and management are happy and the manual
was done on time, the paychecks flow and life is good. If something in the
manual is incorrect, I will fix it in the next iteration.
The topic of the mythical user is rarely discussed. Therefore, the best I
can say is we considered a theoretical user for about 5 minutes and that was
the end of it.
Perhaps my spin on things is old school. Maybe not. With the majority of the
responders in the Rarely and Never categories, it would appear I am not the
only writer in these circumstances.
As someone later responded, if you ask the question: Should we be more
concerned with users, the obvious answer is yes, but with major
qualifications. Yes, the list of things we should be doing is endless, but
there is only so much time and resources for the practical application of
technical writing.
Steven Fenner
Tech Writer
Lake Shore Cryotronics
sfenner -at- lakeshore -dot- com
Deborah Ray wrote:
> To what extent do you, a technical writer, have contact
> with the eventual users of your documents?
I feel pretty fortunate to have been able to answer "always," and perhaps
not surprisingly I think this is the way it should be and I'm disturbed to
find my category rating only a 5% response and "rarely" and "never"
achieving 43% and 25% respectively after 100 votes.
And, there hasn't been much discussion of this question as of today's
digest. So, perhaps I can understand the rarely/never responses if they
come mostly from contract writers (not meaning to insult with this
speculation) but otherwise I find this difficult to understand and would
appreciate some posts as to why this is and why it may or may not be ok.
One specific question might be: I assume your firm's marketing folks
contact the customer--why aren't you part of that? Another might be: do
your designers/engineers contact the customer but leave you out?
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