RE: Is tech writing for me?

["Jane Carnall" <jane -dot- carnall -at- digitalbridges -dot- com>]

I wrote:
> One of the things I really enjoyed about my degree was the small but
> significant number of lecturers who would explicitly encourage originality
> and reward proof that you hadn't just "read the book". One of the things I
> really disliked were the small but significant number of lecturers who
> clearly figured that since we were just there to get the degree, their job
> was to regurgitate the information and tell us how to expectorate it back
>to
> them, with minimal timewasting on either side

Martin Soderstrom wrote:
>While I'm personally a huge proponent of creativity, especially in writing,
>the latter method is probably more useful for a career as a Tech Writer.
>Sometimes all that creativity gets in the way when they want a project
>scoped, planned, researched, written and delivered in the time it would
take
>to decide on a new, cool font or restructured information delivery where
the
>first letter of each chapter spells out ROSEBUD when compiled.  :)

<g> I think you have a limited idea of what "creativity" means... but I did
say "originality", not "creativity". You know: rather than just taking the
material the SMEs give you and formatting it the way they tell you, you use
your intelligence and imagination to ask the right questions and create the
right structure for the information required by the documentation's
end-users. (Even if there are employers who clearly wanted someone who would
lap up the data regurgitated and expectorate it in the right format with
minimal timewasting on anything at all from research to font formatting...)

But then, I'm the kind of person who thought hanging out in a reference
library looking stuff up was a fun way to spend Saturday morning when I was
a teenager. Sad but true.

What technical writers really need creativity for is those moments when they
say to you "The code freeze is next Wednesday lunchtime, can we have a
completed manual by Thursday morning to show to a customer? Put in plenty of
colour graphics and cool screenshots."

Jane Carnall
The writers all stand around a cauldron chanting and occasionally tossing in
a small rosebud. Unless stated otherwise, these opinions are mine, and mine
alone. Apologies for the long additional sig: it is added automatically and
outwith my control.


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