Re: Where did you get your feet wet?

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

I started out as a mechanical engineer doing development and
certification testing in the aircraft/aerospace industry.  The work
consisted of writing test plans, designing test fixtures, writing test 
procedures, a few minutes, hours or days of shaking, baking, 
blowing up, crushing or otherwise destroying test subjects, then 
analyzing the results and writing test reports.  I spent about 7-8
out of every 10 working hours writing something, and then a lot
of the documents I generated was reused in the SOPs, so I ended
up writing or editing most of those.  In those days there were no
formal degrees or certificates in writing, you just did it, and with
luck there'd be someone else to do the typing/wp and page layout
work.  When the bottom fell out of aero in the early 90's, I was
recruited by a chip company that had had unsatisfactory experiences
with writers who had English or journalism educations and had
failed to grasp the tech.  I was the company's first and only writer 
for about a year, and when they IPO'd and decided to grow the 
company became its first pubs manager.  I never had any formal
training except for a semester of tech writing that was part of my
BSME program, and learned everything "tech pubs specific" OTJ.

Gene Kim-Eng



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lori Olcott" <lori_olcott -at- yahoo -dot- com>