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Subject:Re: What to do? From:"Chuck Martin" <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:38:58 -0800
Christine,
I've long been an advocate of the position that Technical Communication is
an engineering discipline. I back it up with my own personal experience
where my TC degree is an engineering one.
In other of my experience, I have had many times where I've been writing
software documentation where I've gone into the code to discover how things
work, and at times have made suggestions to change the code.
With Web applications, many programmers aren't familiar with the APIs of the
various HTML-based Help technologies, so I've written code so the Help can
be called from the Web application.
There's also the aspect of communication in the design of products, which is
Industrail Engineering, related to Interaction Design. Design communicates,
and whether it communicates correctly is a factor in how usable the product
is and how much documentation we have to write. Knowing Interaction Design
and Industrial Engineering concepts as a part of being a Technical
Communicator makes you an even more valuable member of the development team.
Time to go back to indexing....
Chuck Martin
"Anameier, Christine A - Eagan, MN" <christine -dot- a -dot- anameier -at- usps -dot- gov> wrote in
message news:218016 -at- techwr-l -dot- -dot- -dot-
Chuck Martin, with whom I *usually* agree, wrote...
> If you've not already been taught significantly and comprehensively
> in engineering disciplines, then how can you lay claim to the
> "technical" in "technical writer?"
Your question surprises me, Chuck -- I didn't think you were among the
crowd that believes technical writers need an engineering background.
I write end-user software documentation.
There hasn't been a single moment yet in my tech writing life where I
needed to have been taught "significantly and comprehensively in
engineering disciplines." I haven't needed to know programming languages
either. What I have needed has been a solid grasp of how to communicate
information to users, along with an ability to learn new material
quickly and often independently. I need to look at an interface and
figure out where the alligator pits are (it seems there's always at
least one), and steer the users around them if I can't talk somebody
into fixing the problem...
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