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Re: Is being technical writer boring

Subject: Re: Is being technical writer boring
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: louise -at- poptel -dot- net
Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2003 18:48:50 -0700

louise -at- poptel -dot- net wrote:

so what I really want to know is 'is technical writing
boring??'.

That depends. If you're a full-time employee, chained to an endless cycle of revisions of the same product's documentation, then it can be as dull and as meaningless as a Seinfeld routine.

However, there's other conditions under which it can be fascinating. If you're a consultant, working on three or four different products each year, you don't have time to be bored. Ditto if you're a full-time working on a large product line. In either of these cases, you may not be writing about a subject that you would have sought out on your own, but, if you have any curiosity at all, you can find your view of the world and how it's put together enriched. For example, until I did some work for a data-logging company, I wasn't aware of how important temperature and humidity control were to so many modern industries - nor that, until the rise of data loggers, the techniques used to measure these things were pioneered by Leonardo da Vinci over five hundred years ago.


You can also make the job interesting by branching into other types of writing, such as marketing or business, or adding design, usability and/or QA to your work.
Finally, you might be lucky enough to be working on a product that you really care about. I had this opportunity for three years, working for Linux companies, and being involved in the idealism of the open source and free software movements. The experience remains one of my peak work experiences, and I'll probably always compare subsequent job to that period.

Is tech-writing boring? Only if you make it so.


--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield

"We'll fly where money crawls."
-OysterBand, "Rise Above"





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