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RE: Motivation and satisfaction in technical writing
Subject:RE: Motivation and satisfaction in technical writing From:"Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:58:30 -0400
>Mariana,
What Lisa said, but this, too:
The _process_ of gathering information and writing white papers enabled you to learn more about the subject, organize the material better in your head, and construct better ways to think about and talk about the subject than your aliterate colleagues can manage.
So now they are asking you to spoonfeed that hard won knowledge back to them orally. Fine. They learn better aurally than by reading. They _still_ value your work, even if they don't want to read your white papers. That does not devalue you as a writer at all. It is exactly the skills you bring as a writer that they do value.
More than once I've written a white paper only to be asked to condense it to one or two slides to be inserted in some manager's presentation. All those carefully reasoned paragraphs out the window? No, not really. They're still there as backup for the one or two audience members who want to dig behind the bullet points, and they'll serve as guidance later when the subject turns into a development project.
In short, I'd say don't be discouraged just because other people don't express their interest in the way you hoped they would, as long as they are expressing their interest in _some_ way.
As for the zero learning interface idea, there is a lot of learning that goes into designing one, and that's an area where you can have a lot of impact.
Dick
>
>It would be interesting in what the techwriters find their motivation
>for
>working so hard? Please, share some ideas.
>In software development particularly, the latest trends are for "zero
>learning" - interfaces are so easy to navigate that the users don't need
>to
>read any documents. The usability test in our company also proved that
>only
>about 5% are refering to the help or printed documentation of any kind.
>As a freshman in the branch (2 years) I am starting to loose my
>motivation -
>for whome am I acually writing?
>I waist my time writing whitepapers for my colleagues from development
>departments, then they come to me asking: "Please explain me how it
>works, I
>know that you know it you have written about it probably.., and you
>know, I
>don't feel like reading whitepapers"
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