Re: Writer vs Author (was Techwriting after the boom)

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

Actually, I think it would be more accurate to say that the consensus is 
"we want
writers who can produce documents about our products without taking up our
engineers' time."  "Technical" for most company executives would be someone
who can come into the office and engineers' bedrooms at night, absorb product
knowledge from locked file cabinets, powered-down computers and sleeping
R&D personnel by a process akin to the Vulcan mind meld, then disappear for
a few weeks and return with completed documents ready to insert into product
packaging.  Whether these writers are people with sufficient engineering, 
product
and technology skills to be able to take over for the developers except 
that they
just prefer to write or shaman priests sacrificing chickens to pagan gods 
in the
night they couldn't care less, as long as the prospective "communications
specialist" has an established track record of getting the job done with 
virtually
no contribution from them.  Fortunately, if you can actually do something 
remotely
resembling the above, they're still willing to pay pretty good money 
despite the
current state of the economy.

As for the rest of your questions, they want docs that satisfy all legal 
and other
regulatory requirements for pushing product out the door, by their deadlines.
The rest they usually couldn't care less about.

Gene Kim-Eng



At 11:04 AM 6/9/2003 +1000, Michael West wrote: