TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Why not teach NO tools and focus instead on dissecting, analyzing,
organizing, and managing complex technical information.
Why are any of you hung up over which tool to teach? The tool is
irrelevant. ANYBODY can learn to use Frame, Quark, Quack, Duck, Word,
Turd, or MasterMasker 10000 for OpenSource Communist Server. Knowing these
tools does not make you an accomplished writer.
The problem with English departments is simple. The Ivory Tower Tyrants
running these departments don't want to become Devry Technical College. I
can't blame them. But, when they go out to the tech writing community, the
writers tell them "we want Advanced Font Fondling, and FrameMaker for
Flaming Retards 101."
If these English departments stuck with their elitism and structured a
program based on a cross-discipline theories in English, science,
technology, math, and journalism - they might have something useful. But,
they usually don't, because that would be hard and most people would drop
out in the first 10 minutes because such a program would demand that they
actually THINK.
Thus, it is a lot easier to hire some "expert" for $8.00 an hour to teach
FrameMaker for Flaming Retards 101 and charge $9090 a semester for people
to enroll in this exalted certification program.
Unfortunately, the people walking out of these programs are totally
unprepared to deal with the mind-melting agony of explaining things like
Active Directory Replication to monkeys. They think tech writing is just
fiddling with fonts in Frame.
So, I say remove ALL tool-related classes from tech writing programs. Or
at a minimum, reduce it down to a small, small fraction of the courses.
Andrew Plato
Executive Flaming Retard
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Find a job, post your resume. http://careers.yahoo.com
Collect Royalties, Not Rejection Letters! Tell us your rejection story when you
submit your manuscript to iUniverse Nov. 6 -Dec. 15 and get five free copies of
your book. What are you waiting for? http://www.iuniverse.com/media/techwr
Your monthly sponsorship message here reaches more than
5000 technical writers, providing 2,500,000+ monthly impressions.
Contact Eric (ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com) for details and availability.
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
