Re: Techwriting after the boom

[Gene Kim-Eng <gene -at- genek -dot- com>]

Not being a history buff, I can only speak from my own experience.
Back in the 1970's and early 80's I was an engineer, and frequently
wrote specifications, test plans, procedures, reports and field manuals.
I prepared my drafts with a pad and pencil, then passed them on to
Technical Publications.  What came back was pretty much what I sent
in, with grammar, spelling and punctuation corrected and the whole
thing set into type and combined with the illustrations I had prepared
on my drawing board.  But as far as organization, technical content and
about 99% of the text was concerned, *I* wrote it.  If the technical writer
thought that he had a better idea about how to phrase something, he
came to me and got my approval before making any changes to any
of my text, and I mean *any* changes, right down to individual words.
Your list of "communications experts" is exactly right, in that the word
"writer" is not among the job titles.  I was the expert in the subject, and
consequently, *I* was the writer.  Nobody in Technical Publications
groups of that era would even think of changing anything in my draft
without my approval, because their job was not to write anything, but to
*publish* what I as the "subject matter expert" wrote.  Writing was an
integral and very *formal* part of my job description as an engineer.

Gene Kim-Eng



At 12:05 PM 6/8/2003 +1000, Michael West wrote: