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Subject:Re: Degreed and insulted!! From:Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 27 May 1994 09:40:14 CDT
Joan M. Smith writes:
|} Then, this morning, I read that a hiring manager doesn't even
|} look to see if someone is degreed/qualified with courses for
|} writing. It just makes me frustrated that although I always
|} considered myself "a writer" and that is why I got my degree
|} in something which I was good, that the same attitudes about
|} tech writers prevail, even in this day and age when we KNOW
|} that we are needed!
All of the degreed technical writers here at T.I. were alternately
insulted and amused by the thread, but have resisted posting because
this particular topic is one of those ``holy war'' kinds of things.
On the one hand, you have a large number of folks who are not degreed
in technical communication (for many of them, there simply was no such
thing when they attended school) that get very defensive about their
years of on the job training.
On the other hand, there are people who went to four year institutions
to learn how people communicate, and how to apply those fundementals
to communicate specific technical knowledge, that get very defensive about
the four years of time and expense that they went through when people say,
``that stuff is a waste.''
The two camps are too busy justifying their own existance to realize
the underlying concept is that in order to consistently publish high
quality documents in a timely fashion, you simply must apply some
fundemental concepts of technical communication, and _that_ part of the
trade is a craft, not a talent. It must be trained one way or the other.
As to whether grammar and punctuation count, anyone who has been awake
in the last ten years realizes the importance of common ground to the
communication process. As the global economy expands our horizons, it
also reduces the number of things we can consider common in our audience.
Grammar and punctuation in the English language is one of the few
commonalities we have left. If we fail to make proper use of it, we may
fail to communicate. If we fail that, we have failed. <- Period.
_______________ _____
/ ___ __/__\ \ / / _\ Steve Fouts
/___ \| | ___\ | / __\ sfouts -at- ellison -dot- sc -dot- ti -dot- com
/ / \ | \ / \
/_______/__|_______\_/________\ "These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper,
but _minds_ alive on the shelves." -- Gilbert Highet
