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.
Back in the early 80's when I was in engineering school, our professors
knew that the tools they were teaching us were outdated. (They were the
tools that were acquired or donated to the university.) We learned to
program in Pascal even though C was making fast in-roads in the
industry. We programmed on VAX machines even though the PC industry
starting to boom. We used the EMACS editor or the vi editor. We used
ancient volt meters and oscilloscopes. (There are other examples.)
However, the professors also knew that it was more important to teach
the concepts. The concepts of for-loops, the concepts of compile and
link, the concepts of breaking a task down, etc.
As this relates to TW curriculum, I am not advocating that it stay
current with all of the latest and greatest tools on the market. In
fact, I think that they would be doing their students a great service by
teaching only about Word in all of its gory details. While in school,
forget about FrameMaker, forget about RoboHelp, forget about ForeHelp:
teach Word and what can be done with it.
The concepts that are important to the TW are using styles (or the
equivalent), the trade-off's for embedded versus by-reference,
techniques to bring separate documents into a book, macros, etc. Any
student of TW needs to know that Word/tool is not a
glorified-typewriter. They need to be given instruction, assignments,
and tests on why it isn't a typewriter and what can be done with it. As
was the case for me in engineering school, "it will be left as a (job)
assignment to apply aspects of these concepts to new tools."
On the one hand, I side with Andrew the TW curriculum should not be tool
specific. I would say that 90-95% of the curriculum should be a black
box with respect to the tool.
On the other hand, I can't agree that no tools should be taught.
Depending upon the interests of the students, they should devote 5-10%
of their coursework to learning the gory details of tools and what can
be accomplished.
My real point is that I have personally had to doctor back to health way
too many Word documents that came from supposed Word-experts. They had
used the tool like a typewriter and clearly had no deeper understanding
of advanced concepts, such as styles. And then they wondered why their
document was inconsistent in fonts, margins, leading/training white
space, bullets, numbers, etc. (If they drove their car like they used
Word: they could start the car but only knew about 1st and 3rd gear;
they could find the clutch and gas, but not the brake; they had no clue
about windshield wipers or lights, so were definitely fair weather
drivers all the way; Clippy informed them all about the radio, but not
in how to signal and execute a left-hand turn...)
Whenever I get a resume to review, I turn on "reveal codes" and click
around the document. I spot the places where they manually entered
several spaces, several tabs, or several carriage returns. I spot when
the Normal style has be redefined. And all of these serve as early
warnings to me NOT to hire that person.
The way I figure it, if they don't have the ability to explore the tool
of their trade (Word) to learn how to use it efficiently, how does this
reflect on their ability to document new and unfamiliar products? If
they can't adhere to their own conventions, how can I expect them to
adhere to the department's conventions?
Andrew over generalizes about the "process and tool crazed flakes who
spend 99.9% of their time jabbering about how they need to more
efficiently leverage their tool synergies to build best-of-breed
single-sourcing maintainability." He ignores the process- and
tool-ignorant flakes who muck up everything they touch and cause
constant rework because they never learned efficient tool usage on their
own or were never in a TW curriculum that taught this.
The discussion was about TW Curriculum at a university. As such, I would
feel ripped off if they didn't teach me important concepts in tool
usage. I might get a littled miffed at not learning state-of-the-art
tools, but the professor could ease the pain that thoroughly learning
the concept on one tool is more important than learning fragments of
details of the mechanisms in all tools.
In any event, it would be a grave mistake to ignore teaching concepts
that more or less all TW tools share albeit with different
implementation mechanisms.
Glenn Maxey
Technical Writer
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
1765 West 121st Avenue
Westminster, CO 80234-2301
Tel. +1 303.223.5164
Fax. +1 303.223.5275
glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- 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
---
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.
