What does a tech writer do?

[Melissa Hunter-Kilmer <mhunterk -at- BNA -dot- COM>]

On 8 Sep 1997, Debbie Molinaro <debbiem -at- UCS -dot- NET> wrote:

> Over the Labor Day weekend, I had an interesting conversation with a
youngster entering her freshman year of college as an English major.
Apparently, her parents are concerned with what she can "do" with an
English major. I suggested technical writing and she asked me what a tech
writer does.

<snip>
> So, what do you, as a tech writer, do?

I write mostly user documentation.  In the past year, I've written quick
start guides and user handbooks for our products' customers -- the
products are CDs such as BNA's Human Resources Library on CD.  I've also
written training and user materials for end users of software designed
in-house for in-house users.

I was assigned to system documentation at one time, but I had a terrible
time with it.  It was project specifications, badly written for a poorly
conceived project, in MS Word using the master document bug, I mean
feature.  I was not allowed to use different software that would work
better, and it kept taking forever to do stuff _if_ it did it -- often it
would wait half an hour and then crash, or else it would act as if it was
doing what I wanted but really gave me error messages everywhere.  At the
time, my husband was very sick, we were still recovering from the death of
his father, our beloved dog had just died, and my temporary supervisor had
the sensitivity of perhaps a virus.  And I kept getting data late in the
day and had to stay late a lot, which I hate at the best of times.  Others
have done both user and tech doc, and I would like to hear how this is
done.

This is probably a good time to mention the tech-writing wannabe file that
I maintain.  It's called Alice after a tech-writing wannabe I know.  I
will send it out to anybody who wants it -- just ask for c:\ark\alice.
There are, however, two onerous conditions:

1.  The recipient must give me input on the file.  I often include this
input in subsequent versions.

2.  The recipient must write back in six months and tell me how he or she
is doing with regard to tech writing, jobs, etc.

I'm trying to put it on a Web page, but little things like my job and
family keep taking precedence.  ;-)

Speaking of which, I should write some doc!

Melissa Hunter-Kilmer
mhunterk -at- bna -dot- com
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