Re: Strengths tech writers should have to land internships
So, I say the major skill for an intern to have is knowledge of the behavior required to
come up with a properly structured understanding of the product. To be more specific,
knowledge of the behavior required to come up with a rigorous understanding of the end
users goals to be accomplished within the scope of the product, the individual tasks to
accomplish each of these goals, and most importantly, an understanding of the
interrelationships between those tasks.
I guess I have a different take on what the desired outcome of an
internship is than Richard, because I would provide a much different
response.
When I served an internship for Hewlett-Packard back in 1994-5, I
brought with me skills in some software (Word, Doc-to-Help) and an
intense desire to learn new stuff (writing skills, organizational
skills, software skills, interpersonal skills...whatever there was to
learn about, I wanted to learn about it!).
My internship was spent doing the scut work of technical writing. For
example, they had recently converted their 13,000+ page document set
from an internal markup language called hptag to FrameBuilder (the
precursor to today's Structured FrameMaker). While they were able to
do an automated conversion for most of the content, there was still a
fair bit of fixing that needed to happen after the conversion,
especially with cross-references.
So, my mentor taught me how to correct the x-refs, and I spent many
hours doing so. At one point, I asked her who would have fixed the
x-refs if I wasn't there, and she said that *she* would have (she was
a very senior tech writer). It was an eye-opening conversation for me.
When I say that I did scut work, I'm not exhibiting disdain for it,
but rather indicating what it was that HP was able to get out of
having an intern come on board. I freed my mentor up for content
issues by taking care of the low-level stuff. At the same time, I
learned how to use FrameMaker, got a great reference on my resume, got
to try lots of new things (including creating my first web page...this
was 1995, when the web was very new), and learned how a large
corporation works. They took me to meetings in which I saw how they
could be run well or not so well. I got to meet people in different
departments, and got to listen in to my tech writing mentor as she
talked to them and negotiated extensions to deadlines, or deadlines
for document reviews. I learned what the life of a tech writer is
really like while working there for those 8 months (the internship got
extended beyond the 3-month requirement).
I didn't work on content generation while at HP, which I think was
quite appropriate (I would have been documenting radio frequency
circuit board designing software, so the likelihood that I could have
come up to speed enough to accurately write ANY content would have
been next to nil). Based on my experience in an internship, I would
say that baseline tool skills, technical aptitude, and *enthusiasm*
are the most important skills to bring.
--
-David Castro
thejavaguy -at- gmail -dot- com
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Follow-Ups:
- RE: Strengths tech writers should have to land internships, Bonnie Granat
References:
Strengths tech writers should have to land internships: From: Emily Sirois
Re: Strengths tech writers should have to land internships: From: Richard Lewis
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