Re: How times have changed?

[Paul Sholar <sholarp -at- IBM -dot- NET>]

I have been away from TECHWR-L for about three years.
Just resubscribed this week.  When I read a posting like
that by Tim Altom on Nov 12, I wonder whether I ever left.

I don't think that Tim's posting is very useful to the
technical writer/communicator (TW/C) community, for a
number of reasons.

Tim doesn't acknowledge the very dynamic state of the
information industry in the U.S. and around the world, how
this drives the demand for TW/Cs and information designers,
and to what extent the available labor resources are able
to meet that demand.  The U.S. economy is in its best shape
in three decades; in a time of strong economic growth,
job and career mobility increases to a degree not possible
during times of lesser growth.  The fact that today there
are still many entering TW/C work from other fields is a
GREAT INDICATOR about the overall economic demand for our
skills.

I am not up to date about the literature that discusses the
TW/C certification debate, so perhaps my opinion must be
almost fully discounted.  What academic or other author has
done the best job in analyzing and presenting the MINIMUM
set of skills that a technical writer/communicator must
possess?  Who has published the best description of what
it is that most TW/Cs ACTUALLY DO from project to project?
(What TW/Cs ACTUALLY DO indicates what our employers want
us to do.  This is meaningful in an economic sense and
should be competently identified and analyzed.)  Perhaps this
task in itself is so nontrivial that it has not been
adequately accomplished.  If it has been accomplished,
why isn't the pertinent article being hailed in the STC
journals and chapter newsletters?

Tim also doesn't acknowledge the growth of technical writing
programs across the country.  The fact that these programs
exist is allowing hiring managers to require or to prefer
those degrees, majors, or certificates as a condition of
employment for at least some new positions.  Assuming that
these curricula are more or less the same across the county,
then the more entry-level TW/C positions across the country
that are filled by persons coming out of those curricula,
the more de facto standardization will take place in the
employed TW/C community.

I would agree with Tim in the sense that the TW/C community
has not taken advantage of its own resources to develop
a WORKING FRAMEWORK for raising the professionalism of our
daily practice.  For example, I still find it remarkable that
the TW/C community hasn't raised itself up and authored
a specification for an online help/documentation framework
for the Windows environment that meets the needs of actual
TW/C practice.  The TW/C industry is fully in the hands
of Microsoft and the RTF specification.  (Does Microsoft,
based on a specification that is many -- how many? -- years
old, know more about creating online documents than the
internationally based resources of the STC?)  This is a real
detriment at this point in time.  The STC or some such group
should form a committee to define a framework for a set of
tools for creating online documents in the Windows
environment that really do the job.

In contrast, I give the authors of the XML specifications
credit, in that they identified the fact that the original
intent and technical definition of SGML does not make it
the appropriate technology for representing documents that are
predominantly distributed via the WWW. They identified a need
and did something about it.

However, I also don't see that the STC is heavily involved
in the XML specification process.  (I hope I have just been
out the loop, STC-wise.)  The STC should be providing expert
consultation about the functional requirements for, and preferred
usability characteristics of, the tools that will be required
to manipulate XML-based objects.  (As of August 1998, the XML
community has published only a working draft of its
specification for the XSL, the Extensible Style Language.)
If the STC doesn't get, or stay, on the case, the XML train
will leave the station without the TW/C community having had
significant input about a technology and toolset that will
heavily influence our collective livelihoods for years to come.

I'll stop there for now.

Communicate well and prosper,

  Paul Sholar, technical writer
  sholarp -at- ibm -dot- net

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