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I think a technical writer needs to be more of a generalist, especially in positions where you're writing documents for regular users and not engineers or designers. If you start becoming a specialist when you're still writing for a general audience, you start to lose touch with the user-level concerns that affect what you include and how you write it. I think what a technical writer needs most of all when it comes to learning technology is the ability to learn new things quickly. After all, we are likely to have to jump from one company to another, one contract to another, one project to another, as you wrote of about working six roles. Get too specialized, and it gets too hard to do a brain dump and clear learning capacity for the new stuff.
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From: Anonymous <anonymous -at- techwhirl -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: Anonymous: Burnout, advancement and career changing
Sorry about the previous post, Connie failed to complete all the copy &
paste operations required!
Anonymous 2 writes:
I feel similar. In the last four years I have worked in six tech
writing roles for as many industries. Just when I got settled with the
technology and products, something happened to the company so I was no
longer required. No fault of my own. I work hard.
It upsets me that I haven't ever had time to develop a specialist's
knowledge about the products or the tools, but that's just the way the
cards fell.
Even now I am working on a giant project whose timelines are making
many of us ill. The technology platform is completely new to everyone,
including the company itself, and we cannot predict the outcome
because of it. I am spread so thin between different tasks: the
variety excites me, but now it's stressing me out.
So yes, I think this is unusal, but I also think it's more common in
our industry. After all, we're cutting edge, aren't we?
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