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I would go further and question whether it ever was.
The simple fact is that a great many research, design,
test, manufacturing and service engineers *can* write,
and can do it well. It's simply that in the crush of
trying to meet deadlines they often don't have the
time to go out and research user needs and write on
top of everything else that's on their plates, or that
they simply choose not to put in the necessary effort
to do the job well because they don't like the work.
It is true, I think, that in the last 20-30 years or
so there has been a decline in the percentage of
engineers who can communicate well, as there has been
in many other professions (the reasons for this general
decline could form the basis for an OT thread that
would eat this list alive, so I just won't go there),
but as we have seen in the past couple of years, when
the economy causes companies to look for ways to reduce
costs, most of them are able to cut their writing staffs,
lean on their engineers to do the work whether they
want to or not and get by until things get busy again.
As much as we might hate it, I've yet to hear of a
company going out of business because they didn't have
good technical writers.
Gene Kim-Eng
------- Original Message -------
On
Thu, 26 Jun 2003 14:37:40 -0600 Smith, Martin?wrote:
I'm not so sure that the engineers can't write argument is enough to build a
career upon these days.
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