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Julie, your comments reinforce something that I've been trying for years to make clear to employers. A good technical writer is actually a multi-functional entity. For many products, a TW acts as a first-line product tester, a built-in one-person customer focus group. Of all personnel in the company, TWs who do user guides and help systems use the product in a way most like the customers will.
When it comes to discussing raises and department budgets, that is one thing that can be argued about TW work being value added. We both backstop and parallel the efforts of the QA branch, but with a different focus so it increases the likelihood of finding user-level flaws. So it can be argued that we expand and improve the QA process.
> While writing documentation I've uncovered bugs,
> usabiity problems,
> missing features, misspellings in the UI and configuration
> files, and
> all sorts of other issues that eventually led to a better
> product.
>
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