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I feel that I have to be very technical to document what I'm documenting
now - I'm writing a Developers Guide for a software architecture system
that we developed in-house. I'm up to my eyeballs in code. <save me!> When
I'm done with that I have to document a bunch of protocols that have been
developed within this system. I guess I could let the developers go
through the code and extract all the information about the APIs, but to
me, that would be being a format monkey.
OTOH, although I get kind of a charge out of doing something this
complicated at work, and I'm certainly not falling asleep at my desk like
I did at my last job, there is ZERO chance I'd be pursuing this on my own
time. I might take a C++ class so I don't have to bug the developers with
so many newbie-type questions, but that's as far as I go. In fact, in
terms of what I do, I'm not even sure what "follow this up on my own time"
would mean. I've gotten C++ books, certainly, and the Gordon & Gordon
book. But that's been stuff that I did strictly because I needed to do it
to perform this function. It's certainly not my off-time reading material.
FWIW, although this wasn't the poll question, I have a great relationship
with my SMEs, and they're pretty psyched that I even want to do this work
at all. Sometimes they've been teasing me about getting it wrong for the
second or third time, but I think they have some level of admiration for
me just for trying. And quite a bit of it I've done right, which has saved
them HOURS of work documenting stuff, which they hate.
Maybe that's a difference in what you're talking about Bruce? That I'm
excited to be doing the work, getting the new skills, without necessarily
being that excited about what the code does?
***********************************************
Anne Robotti
Technical Writer
RadiSys Corporation
7 Clarke Drive, Cranbury NJ 08512
(609) 655-3111 x-326
Meddle not in the affairs of technical writers, for the box contains three
jacks and the board only has two plugs...
Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
Sent by: bounce-techwr-l-70580 -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
07/30/2001 02:43 PM
Please respond to Bruce Byfield
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Subject: Re: New TECHWR-L Poll Question
Deborah Ray wrote:
> How interested are you, as a technical writer, in
> the subject that you document?
It occurs to me that those who believe that as high a degree of
knowledge as possible should be sought might be more likely to answer
this question "Very" - that's certainly true of me, anyway. By contrast,
those who suggest that expert knowledge isn't necessary might tend to
answer "somewhat" or "not very." I'm looking forward to seeing whether
I'm right or wrong.
I'm saddened to think that so many people are spending their lives at
work that they don't especially care for. However, more to the point, I
strongly suspect that the answers would be very different for
developers. At least a large minority of geeks are regularly increasing
their knowledge, and some even program in their spare time for open
source or free software projects. I wonder: could that be the reason
that so many tech-writers don't get along with their SMEs? Could the
geeks unconsciously sense the indifference to the topics that occupy
large chunkes of their lives?
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