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I'm not sure exactly what about this conversation bothered
you. Your co-worker pretty much summed up what your role
as a technical writer in a Mfg dept is: to act as a bridge
between R&D and Mfg; to watch and know the Mfg environment
and processes, to ensure that information provided to Mfg
by R&D takes Mfg needs into account, *and* to find and
correct R&D's errors before they get to Mfg. In short, to
do a lot of things that R&D scientists *might* very well
be able to do themselves for Mfg, but *don't,* either
because they haven't got the time or just don't give a
damn about Mfg's needs. Sounds fairly important to me,
and it must be to someone there, or you wouldn't be there
and the Mfg people would just be spending their time going
to R&D and complaining about a need that wasn't being
addressed.
Gene Kim-Eng
------- Original Message -------
On
Thu, 26 Jun 2003 13:14:04 -0600 ?wrote:
Hello all. I just experienced a situation, which I'm sure some of you must
have experienced before. I'm writing it now to sort of exhale. I just got
in a heated discussion, debate, what not, about the purpose or necessity
of a technical writer--at least that's what I think we were discussing.
Anyway, I work in manufacturing and one of my main roles is to revise and
re-write production procedures. My co-worker expressed that most R&D
scientists can write good procedures themselves, because they had to have
been able to write a good thesis for their masters or what have you. She
concluded that if they were able to write a good thesis, they would be
able to write a simple procedure. But, I argued if that were true, why was
I hired to re-write the procedure R&D originated? She answered with,
"Because they wrote it a long time ago, and no one has udpated them." But
I told her that even newer procedures are coming over to mfg. with
mistakes and such. She replied with, "Yeah, that's because they don't know
the manufacturing environment and write mistakes, but they don't have the
time to come down and watch the process." I said that was exactly my
point. They (R&D) doesn't take into account the different environment that
manufacturing is. The whole conversation just made my temp. rise. I felt
like that old cliche, "Anyone can be a tech writer, they just fix grammar
and formatting." Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
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