Just another reviewer/editor anecdote

[Randy Allen Harris <raha -at- WATARTS -dot- UWATERLOO -dot- CA>]

Once upon a time, I wrote for a Connecticut military company which better
remain nameless, the first technical writer they hired.  My job was to
observe how certain complicated guidance gizmos were made and document the
procedure to help train future employees (training to that point operated
mostly by folklore; Betty learned from Wilma who learned from Marge, who
learned from ... way, way back, a design engineer).  It was a fascinating
job.  The workers were almost entirely  minority females, with a spotty
education.  They had introduced a few superstitious behaviors in the
folkloric transmission of the procedures, and they had invented
labour-saving shortcuts that the engineers hadn't thought of.

Cutting to the chase, I handed in my first few instructional procedures in
a batch, long-hand, for the secretary to type up (this was in the dark
ages), and I didn't see them again until a month or so later when a worker
came to me.  She couldn't make head or tail of her set of instructions.  I
looked them over and found that they were indeed fairly obtuse, but they
also weren't what I had written.

Tracing back over the train of desks that the instructions had crossed, I
eventually found out that the secretary who was supposed to type them up
had (in her words) "covered for" me.  She saw that I had ignorantly used
all these unprofessional words, like "get" and "put", and kindly replaced
them with more professional terms, like "obtain" and "deploy", so I
wouldn't lose my job.

I had to go back and systematically change the first dozen or so procedures
into simpler terms for the workers.


Randy Allen Harris                          raha -at- watarts -dot- uwaterloo -dot- ca
Rhetoric and Professional Writing           519 885-1211, x5362
English, U of Waterloo                      FAX:  519 884-8995
Waterloo ON, CANADA, N2L 3G1