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France Baril wrote:
> It seems to me like this discussion is bringing us back to the eternal
question:
> "Do you have to know a field to write about it?". It seems to me that our
eternal
> answer is that it depends what you write about and who your audience is.
Robert Caro won a Pulitzer prize for writing a biography of Robert Moses,
which makes him an expert on the subject of Robert Moses. Later he wrote a
biography of Lyndon Johnson which also won a Pulitzer prize.
How could Caro manage to write well about LBJ, when he was an expert on
Robert Moses, not on LBJ?
The answer is that he was an expert *biographer,* not an expert just on any
one individual life. When he started the first book, he wasn't an expert on
Robert Moses. But when he finished, he was.
In the same way, a tech writer who is knowledgable about business data
processing, and software development, and knowledgable about the supporting
tools and infrastructure, can very easily work in multiple industry domains
and acquire expertise on the job.
