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Re: Anonymous: Burnout, advancement and career changing
Subject:Re: Anonymous: Burnout, advancement and career changing From:Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com> To:Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> Date:Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:27:31 -0500
I disagree. I think a technical writer needs to be exactly what is
needed for the products, industry, and community they are supporting
with information. In some cases it may make sense for them to be a
generalist. In other cases it may make sense for them to be so skilled
as to be able to make the products or perform the work they are
supporting but instead are aimed at providing quality information.
A tech writer who documents toasters can't be lumped into one who
documents software, or SDKs, or power plants, or chemical filtration
equipment.
Jumping from one company to another is not a valid excuse for
promoting a generalist approach to the profession. It's just one
perspective of the types of work we perform. Many people don't choose
tech writing because they like to write procedures. Many have an
interest in a particular industry or subject matter, and align
themselves with that interest in the role of writer.
We often talk about tech writing like it's a be-all, end-all
profession on its own. It's not, and I hate to burst that professional
bubble but it's true. Technical writing is a role, a discipline, that
spans many industries in varying ways. Two people could build a
lifetime of experience in technical writing and have very little
overlap of experience. It may start and end with tools use and basic
types of information produced (procedural, reference, etc.). A tech
writer within the chemical engineering world likely has a very
different work day than one in the ecommerce world. And while the
ecommerce writer can build a career on being company-agile and get by
with the ability to learn new things quickly, one within a chemical
engineering world likely won't get by without full immersion into the
field, in depth research into the subject matter, and likely detailed
proprietary knowledge about how their employer goes about their facet
of the industry, and therefore would be a more long-term employee.
It's all relative. A tech writer needs to be what the role they're
filling needs them to be.
On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> 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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