Getting published at work?

[Geoff Hart <Geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Leona Dupree is <<... trying to get the documents I am
writing for the company I work for published, but I am
running into many road blocks. I was told today by my
manager that there is no point in entering my "how to guides"
in any journal or getting them published.>>

There are really two aspects to this: publishing to advertise
the company, and publishing for your own satisfaction and to
improve the state of knowledge in the profession. If you
haven't been able to persuade the company as to the merits of
publication on their behalf (and one of our local companies,
SpeedWare, has a wall of awards for their documentation that
they always wow clients with... could you use that anecdote
to bolster your case?), it may be simplest to just let the matter
drop. That doesn't mean that you can't ask for permission (get
it in writing!) to publish on your own, with no mention of the
company.

<<What have you all run into regarding trying to get
documents published through your company...>>

I simply don't bother asking them. What I do with my own
time is nobody's business, and I made that quite clear when I
interviewed for this position. An important clarification:
Nothing that I publish is confidential or unique to the
company; for that kind of publishing, I'd definitely get
permission first. (I'll be doing a usability study of indexing
HTML files this summer--with luck--and will definitely get
permission first; if not, I may create my own study unrelated
to projects at work.)

<< and what are most Technical Writers in the industry doing
to get published?>>

Well, first and foremost, I occupy unreasonable amounts of
bandwidth on techwr-l. <g> Second, I keep copies of my
own messages, and the ones that light a spark, I flesh out into
larger articles. I usually submit these to _Intercom_ (since I'm
a loyal STC member and since they seem to like my stuff),
but other articles will appear in various forms elsewhere (e.g.,
in a newsletter column I'm currently working on). If you've
got something interesting to say, and can say it well, there's
no doubt you'll find someone who'll happily publish it.


--Geoff Hart @8^{)}     Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent."--Qui-Gon Jinn

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