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Once again, I find myself in general agreement with Andrew, with perhaps a few suggested modifications.
Unfortunately (in my view), too many tech pubs departments today consider editing in the same way Andrew does, as merely an English manipulation skill requiring little if any subject matter expertise.
I believe they would be much better advised to have editors who are fully capable technical writers who can serve as mentors for junior writers on matters of style while also maintaining technical accuracy in the finished product. In the smaller department settings, in fact, it may be most appropriate for the department manager to serve in that function. As the department grows, grooming another senior writer to fulfill the editor/mentor function and cultivating through the department a practiced understanding of the organization's style guides and templates can lead to a much more effective and efficient workflow.
In my view, this prepares the individuals for a smooth transition when there is attrition and ensures a consistent end product that is otherwise more difficult to attain.
My second area of comment concerns the writing end of things. I have seen many times when documents being prepared for end users who themselves are not particularly technical were too difficult for that audience to understand and follow. At times, depending upon the writers available to do the job, a relatively untechnical writer with a similar worldview as the intended audience can create a better end product than many writers who are much deeper technically but who may find it difficult to keep the audience in mind. Best of all possible worlds, of course, is a writer who can do both--but that is not always easy to find!
Therefore, if there is a fairly usual mix of writers in a particular staff, some with much more technical background and others with less, there is plenty of room for both when documenting products that must be used by fairly untutored end users but which must be deployed and maintained by highly technical individuals.
I am in nearly complete agreement otherwise with Andrew's comments--and I believe his distinction between writing, editing, and desktop publishing is a valuable one. In fact, if an organization has a well-developed set of templates for the documents it produces, the need for the "desktop publishing" side is dramatically reduced. Most shops I have worked in have been far from this ideal state, however, and the work product represented much wasted time in format overrides that were so time consuming to clean up in the document maintenance process.
Where I am sure Andrew will depart from me is that too many of these instances were documents created in Word, where it is much too easy to improperly employ styles--but that is a conversation for another day!
David
-----Original Message from Andrew Plato <gilliankitty -at- yahoo -dot- com>-----
<Jeanne -dot- Keuma -at- ch2m -dot- com> wrote ...
> Tech comm/tech writing/tech editing degrees should not necessarily
> require "tech" courses in engineering or science.
I could not disagree more emphatically. However, this depends on what kind of
tech comm work a person wants to do...
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---
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