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Re: Perceptions of TW (was RE: Documentation estimates)
Subject:Re: Perceptions of TW (was RE: Documentation estimates) From:stevefjong -at- comcast -dot- net To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 15 Dec 2006 17:18:56 +0000
Yeah, I've heard some disturbing perceptions of what technical writers do as well. The verbs bandied about include:
Type
Format
Clean up
Copy and paste
Decorate (my "favorite" 8^(
Professionals should be exemplars, but I fear not every person doing technical writing fills the bill. I have worked with people who rose from the secretarial pool to technical writing, and while some have been good professional writers, others didn't make the mental adjustment. They tried to maneuver their SMEs into giving them draft material which they then typed up. These "writers" were functionally no more than word-processing operators, or maybe technical typists--honorable work, but not what they were being paid to do.
Frankly, if you have someone like that in your group, it can be a problem, because they make everyone else look bad to someone like Dori Green's incompetent former boss. I'm not a real fast typist, but I can sure type faster than I can write! I once revised documents by a former administrative assistant turned "writer," and in the souce files you could literally see from the formatting marks what she had copied from Outlook mail, what she had copied from developers' Word documents, and what she had lifted whole from specs. (In the last case, it was the use of future tense and subjunctive mood that gave her away: an appendix describing how the software worked contained statements such as "it would be nice if ..." It took me much longer to fix those problems than it took her to "write" the original.)
Come to think of it, perhaps the misperceptions we complain about have some basis in fact 8^(
I think all we can do as individual professionals is to do a good job, raise the bar of expectations, and hope that the person writing our reviews knows the difference between writing and typing.
-- Steve
Steven Jong, Past President
STC Boston Chapter
978-413-2553 [C]
Boston Chapter Web site: www.stcboston.org
* I am a candidate for STC Director *
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